Have you considered including environmental management strategies in your business plan?
Performing an environmental audit and developing an Environmental Management System (EMS) can be useful in focusing your environmental strategies on areas of your business that will benefit most.
An environmental audit highlights how your business affects the environment and sets a benchmark for improvement. You can also use an EMS in conjunction with your audit to introduce processes and procedures that will assist your environmental strategies.
An environmental audit is useful for finding the areas of your business that impact the most on the environment. It is also an effective risk management tool for checking how effectively your business acts in accordance with environmental regulations.
An environmental audit assesses the nature and extent of harm to the environment caused by the activities, waste or noise from your business. Use the audit as a tool to help you:
- assess how you can manage or improve the condition of the environment
- priorities what actions you can take to reduce your impact on the environment
- demonstrate accountability to third parties such as government, customers and shareholders.
Environmental audits must be independent, objective, credible and transparent in order to be successful. Audits should also be regular and ongoing, and conducted against a benchmark or initial assessment, generally detailed in your environmental plan.
Read More: Environmental planning and auditing
