Environmental Footprinting in the IT-for-Green Project – A CEMIS Use Case

Abstract

This paper presents functionality and design elements of a Corporate Environmental Management Information System (CEMIS) in the project IT-for-Green: Next Generation CEMIS for Environmental, Energy and Resource Management . The CEMIS under development in the IT-for-Green project uses a service-oriented architecture whose functionality will be demonstrated by means of a use case. Despite the theoretical development of CEMIS for as long as 20 years, CEMISs are not commonly used by companies. There is a substantial gap between the research and the use of CEMISs in companies, which the paper at hand aims to reduce by proposing a flexible and adoptable architecture to support companies in their current efforts. The developments in the case of company communication and the demands of stakeholders, especially in the field of corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting, require handling. The development in the company communication and scientific community imply the extension of environmental to sustainability reporting which includes environmental, social and economic aspects. Current CEMIS are required to handle more and more business processes (as data source etc.) in the daily business of companies; the paper will indicate benefits of using an integrated CEMIS in the information technology (IT) landscape of a company. The paper will briefly introduce the IT-for-Green project and the software developed. The main focus is on a real world example the paper shows how our CEMIS can be used to assess the environmental impact of a product.