Attachment A - Environmental Management Systems in Context

(A model for the implementation of EMS in Agriculture)

An environmental management system (EMS) is a process for managing the organisation’s impacts on the environment. It can also be used as the organisation’s business management system if desired. National and international standards for environmental management systems incorporate a cycle of activities comprised of five stages:

1. making a commitment to manage one’s environmental impacts
   
2. planning for management of the environmental impacts
   
3. implementing a plan to manage the impacts
   
4. ‘checking’ that operations are proceeding according to plan, and
   
5. reviewing the whole process from time to time to ensure that the system and its plan are appropriate and the assumptions on which it is based are correct and changing your actions accordingly.

An EMS is an iterative process, implementing the necessary management measures and repeating the management cycle with a view to continual improvement.

As a process, EMS cannot exist or work effectively in isolation from other key factors:

• farm and business priorities of market access and productivity
  
• community, industry and market expectations and requirements
  
• the landscape/environment needs at both farm and catchment scale
  
• compliance with legislation
  
• knowledge, information and management skills
  
• “best practice’ and other environmental and management performance guides or requirements, including Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP), QA, industry codes of practice, and OH&S.
  
• methods for assessing management progress, and
  
• achieving recognition for time and effort invested.

Challenges for sustainable primary production

Sustainable businesses must meet a number of challenges, now and into the future:

Financial: Developing and maintaining a robust enterprise.

Economic: Ensuring that the use of natural resources does not compromise or diminish their economic potential for production purposes.

Environmental: Protecting environmental assets and qualities for ongoing use and future generations, for production, biodiversity and for the environmental services that the environment provides, including meeting legislative requirements.

Social: Ensuring that our community and communities locally and globally benefit from and are not damaged or disadvantaged by our actions.

An EMS can support the management of the agricultural enterprise in a systematic, purposeful manner that can assist in meeting the above challenges.  An EMS has a focus on significant local/property environmental issues and continual improvement is a priority.

A decision to develop and implement an EMS needs to take account of the management needs. For many primary producers, audited best management practices, or environmental self-assessment are the preferred approach and meet their current market and environmental aspirations. Primary producers can build on these processes to develop an EMS with a stepped approach.

Other primary producers may prefer to develop their EMS as an integrated and holistic system, designed to provide an overall management system for an enterprise, in which OH&S, quality assurance, supply chain requirements and environmental management are all combined in one system. An EMS that is compliant with the ISO 14001 national and international standard can be audited and certified if desired, depending on the priorities and needs, especially market expectations and intentions of the producer.

Codes of Practice, Best Management Practice

Best Management Practice (BMP) Guidelines, Codes of Practice or standards that may be requirements of access to markets (such as EUREGAP) or for the granting of a licence to access water rights, can be integrated into an EMS. Such codes or standards provide the benchmarks by which the enterprise can judge its performance. They allow an indication that management effort, especially environmental management effort, is reaching or surpassing the levels expected from scientific or technical reasoning or perhaps demanded by the community.

Verification and Labelling

Documentation, measuring and recording provides a means of demonstrating to ourselves or others that we are working to an agreed process or have achieved the desired benchmark. The EMS approach can help with these processes. Under an EMS, confirmation or recognition can be self-assessed, or independently verified by 2^nd or 3^rd party auditors.

If a primary producer wants to market products, for example through an environmental or “eco” label, based on sound environmental management and safe, quality food, an EMS process can help to underpin and document claims of compliance with codes or standards, or truth in labelling laws.

Graphic Model

The attached diagram “A Model for Environmental Management in Agriculture,” illustrates how these elements might be brought together to achieve both economic and environmental outcomes and, potentially, financial benefits.

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