What are the best practices for accessing environment variables in PHP scripts, considering the changes in PHP 5.4.4?

When accessing environment variables in PHP scripts, it is recommended to use the `getenv()` function to retrieve the values. This ensures that the variables are accessed safely and securely. With the changes in PHP 5.4.4, it is important to be mindful of potential security vulnerabilities that may arise from improperly accessing environment variables.

// Accessing environment variables using getenv()
$variable = getenv('ENV_VARIABLE_NAME');
if($variable){
    // Do something with the variable
    echo $variable;
} else {
    // Handle case where variable is not set
    echo "Variable not found";
}