Eco-Industrial Parks and Application of Corporate Environmental Management Information System in China

The history, current situation, policy system and three typical cases for eco-industrial parks in China have been described and analyzed systematically. On the basis of this, application of CEMIS to EIPs has been discussed. A CEMIS framework for EIPs has been proposed according to the Chinese policy system. Furthermore, a schematic control diagram for EIPs has been suggested using box model.

The German Environmental Information Portal PortalU

In Germany, public environmental data are in the responsibility of several different public organisations and institutions. The German Environmental Information Portal PortalU® (www.portalu.de) is a web service operated by the environmental administrations to make digital environmental information easier accessible, usable and exploitable for both citizens and environmental experts. The fruitful long-time co-operation between the environmental administrations is an example for a well working organisational structure within a federal state. In this chapter the PortalU technology and the content of the portal are presented. Due to the current discussion referring to INSPIRE, a special focus is set on publishing INSPIRE conform metadata.

Development of an Information System for the Assessment of different Bioenergy Concepts Regarding Sustainable Development

From an environmental, economic, social, and technical perspective, this chapter focuses on a sustainability assessment of concepts for the energetic use of biomass in order to provide decision support for different options of biomass use. In rural areas, bioenergy concepts are of particular interest in this context. These can for example be biogas plants which are operated by electric service providers, or a biogas plant owned by one farmer, or bioenergy villages. The topic relates to the development of suitable criteria and to the adaption of existing indicator systems to the special requirements of sustainable biomass use for energy. The results of this sustainability assessment consider the different biomass concepts’ advantages and disadvantages, which are illustrated by multi-criteria valuation methods. Furthermore, the sustainability assessment of bioenergy concepts has specific requirements with regard to an information system in terms of data and information’s demand and supply side.

Structuring Information for Industrial Environmental Management

Environmental management of an organization is to a large extent about management, interpretation and development of environmental information. Therefore, for any organization to have a functioning environmental management system a matching well-functioning environmental information system is needed. To develop such a well-functioning information system it is necessary to structure all the relevant dimensions, ranging from indicators, reporting paths, material management and process management. This chapter provides an introduction to the structuring of the environmental information system.

Investigation of Environmental Monitoring Designs for Corporate Management Information Systems

The evaluation of an organization’s environmental performance is an integral part of a corporate environmental management information system. This chapter considers an organization’s environmental impact assessment with respect to a water resource. It investigates formal approaches to the development of temporal monitoring designs for producing data sufficient to perform the assessment. In this study, simple random sampling, stratified random sampling, and designs obtained using greedy search have been investigated with respect to their compatibility with a corporate environmental management information system. All three approaches determine temporal monitoring designs with minimal costs and supply data sufficient for estimation of water quality indicators for a given level of uncertainty. It is shown that monitoring designs obtained using the greedy search approach will outperform other designs when the level of uncertainty in the estimate must be low. If high levels of uncertainty are tolerable, simple random designs become preferable due to their simplicity and effectiveness. The proposed approaches lead to automated procedures which can be easily integrated into a corporate environmental management information system.

Additional Challenges for CEMIS Due to Impacts Caused by Climate Change

The aim of this paper is to evaluate how CEMIS could be enhanced to cope with impacts caused by climate change. In our time, firms have to deal with the resulting challenges such as increasing complexity and dynamics of the environment. By developing cultural competences, firms will be empowered to handle these new challenges appropriately. CEMIS itself as a managerial tool has an excellent potential to increase organizational resilience against vulnerabilities due to impacts caused by climate change. CEMIS could provide climate change scenarios for different impacts in global and regional dimensions. Scenarios as alternative images of how the future might unfold are an appropriate tool to analyze how driving forces may influence future emission outcomes and to assess the associated uncertainties and risks. They assist in climate change analysis, including climate modeling and the assessment of impacts, adaptation and mitigation. Theoretical enlargements of the CEMIS concept will be discussed by resilience thinking, which is promising for CEMIS because of its turning away from the equilibrium assumption, its widespread comprehension of the environment and its influences, its assumption of flexibility and adaptiveness through the adaptive capacity. The discussion will be exemplified by firms from the food industry, which are highly vulnerable towards direct and also indirect impacts caused by climate change along certain supply chains. Changing qualities and quantities of resources, temporary shortage of resources or conflicts between energy and food can all have drastic effects on firms in the food industry. Supported by CEMIS as a critical information system, emerging conflicts due to changing societal and cultural processes can be recognized sensitively, reflected critically, and reconfigured creatively to the aim of sustainable strategic management. Based on the theory of social practice and the competence theory of the firm, the development of cultural competences, as an integral part of the practical intelligibility of firms and as a learning concept for adaptive capacity, enables firms to handle these new challenges in times of expanding uncertainty and risk appropriately.

Management Instruments for Sustainable Information Systems Management

The increasing dissemination of information systems (IS) into all areas of business and personal life has drawn attention to its economic, environmental and social effects. IS organizations are becoming aware that they have to take up their responsibility by thinking seriously about sustainability management for information systems. While measures for using computing resources efficiently have received considerable attention, the topic of sustainability in IS management is still lacking theoretical and conceptual foundation. As a contribution to the ongoing discussion of “Green IT”, the purpose of this chapter is to apply the concept of sustainability into the field of IS management using practical concepts such as a procedural model, the balanced scorecard and a maturity model.

Green Information Technology and Virtualization in Corporate Environmental Management Information Systems

Businesses today must not only be concerned with their day-to-day operations and the making of profit, but also with a set of challenges related to the public perception, the environment, and the costs of energy consumption. The image of the company from the perspective of customers and the public in general must be carefully monitored as it relates to the environment and the use of natural resources and energy. The demonstration of effective strategies that allow for “greener” and more ecological awareness, will gain the respect of customers, businesses, stockholders, and other concerned groups. The protection of our environment is also a major agenda of firms today. This paper discusses how “Green IT” along with the concepts of “Virtualization” can provide for better organizational, operational, and environmental outcomes.

Efficiency

Recently, there has been increasing recognition that computer-based information systems should better support corporate sustainability management. New administrative approaches, e.g. in the field of emission trading, and recommendations, for instance regarding carbon footprints of products, require a new type of information systems in companies. These new components can be called corporate environmental management information systems (CEMIS). What is the purpose of these systems? They should provide the required information for environmental or sustainability management. But what is the idea behind? What is the guiding principle of these systems? This chapter discusses efficiency as a guiding principle of CEMIS. It helps to understand better basic methodologies like life cycle assessment, and it provides presuppositional knowledge for the challenge of introducing these information instruments.

Effective Stakeholder Relations

Compared to the DIN EN ISO Standard 14001 every organization has to create – in respect to environmental aspects and environmental system – processes so that internal communications between different organization levels and function, or proper questions and answer coming from outer site could be guaranteed. One of the possibilities to realize these requirements is the introduction of an organization wide GRI-guideline, created by the idea of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), which can easily be published in the Internet. But normally not all environmental information is necessary for everybody, resulting in an information flood. Following the idea to represent special information to special interest groups we present an idea of how to convert these sustainability reports into a Topic Maps by using eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL).