| Literature DB >> 35846450 |
M Ladyman1, E Gutierrez-Carazo1, F Persico1, T Temple1, F Coulon2.
Abstract
Managing environmental risk is essential to ensure organisations minimise their impact on the environment, comply with environmental legislation and maintain their reputation in an increasingly environmentally aware society. Organisations frequently use management systems to plan and execute routine environmental assessments, however environmental impacts may still arise from routine activities or accidents that could be avoided by effective environmental management. Currently there is no method for an organisation to assess the level of awareness their employees have of activities that may lead to an environmental impact, or the level of uptake of environmental management processes. Therefore, the Environmental Management Performance Assessment (EMPA) process was developed to enable organisations to self-assess existing environmental management processes by survey of their employees. The EMPA process was aligned to key phases of the Deming Cycle and involves development and distribution of a survey to organisation employees. The responses are then used to recognise areas for improvement by progression through a bespoke flow chart integrated with the initial survey. This enables demonstration of how particular hazards arise from insufficient awareness at different stages in the Deming Cycle and how these hazards can have wider, reputational, economic, and legislative consequences. The process was trialled by surveying academic researchers on the environmental management processes in their laboratories as a sample set.Entities:
Keywords: Deming cycle; Environmental hazard; Environmental performance; Environmental questionnaire; Plan-do-check-act
Year: 2022 PMID: 35846450 PMCID: PMC9280376 DOI: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2022.e09135
Source DB: PubMed Journal: Heliyon ISSN: 2405-8440
Figure 1Outline of Environmental Management System process, with the Deming Cycle aligned to key phases of ISO14001:2015 (leadership, support and operation, performance evaluation, improvement, and planning). An example of how an EMS embeds plan-do-check-act.
Flowchart steps aligned to key phases of ISO14001:2015 audit question set and the deming cycle.
| Flowchart Steps | Alignment with ISO14001 | Hazard |
|---|---|---|
| 1: Does your organisation require you to be aware of the environmental risk of your research? | Lack of engagement | |
| 2: On a scale of 1–5 how often do you consider the environmental impact of your research? | ||
| 3: Where is your organisation (UK, EU, North America, South America, Asia, Australasia, Africa)? | ||
| 4: Does your organization provide ERA training? | Ineffective communication | |
| 5: Do you know who is responsible for your ERA? | No feedback Mechanism | |
| 6: Do you know who to report an environmental accident to? | ||
| 7: Does your ERA require authorization? | ||
| 8: Is the ERA reviewed regularly? | ||
| 9: Are the completed ERAs available organization-wide? | No continual Improvement |
Figure 2Environmental Management Systems Performance Assessment (EMPA) flowchart developed to align to ISO14001 and Deming Cycle (plan-do-check-act) demonstrating the pathways (green) and endpoints (hazards) (black) and the percentage responses for each question. The start point is at the blue box.
Figure 3Demographic locations of participants who responded ‘no’ (% per country) when asked whether they needed to undertake/read an ERA prior to conducting research and their response to how often they personally consider the environmental impact of their research on a scale of 1–5. Where 1: never; 2: occasionally; 3: sometimes; 4: often; 5: frequently.
Figure 4Environmental Management Performance Assessment hazards aligned to reputational, economic, and legislative consequences based on levels of environmental risk.