GIS Capabilities for Strategic Environmental Management
By Damon Judd

Environmental Management Systems
A corporate manager with environmental, health, and safety (EH&S) responsibilities for multiple manufacturing facilities faces broad scale challenges which carry a stringent need for high-quality, timely information. With the total cost of environmental compliance on the rise, organizations are looking for cost-effective approaches to deal with their environmental concerns. Increasingly, companies are developing more complex systems to help cope with the challenges posed by regulatory compliance and continual environmental performance improvement issues.
      Newly evolving sets of international environmental management system (EMS) standards, such as ISO 14000, are driving some firms to more closely examine their existing information management systems to determine how well they are addressing environmental concerns. An EMS is that aspect of an organization's overall management structure that addresses the immediate and long-term impact of its products, services, and processes on the environment. ISO 14000 is the most recognized of these EMS standards. The first of the ISO 14000 family of standards, ISO 14001, will soon be published in final form as an international standard defining a company's EMS.
      The advent of sophisticated data processing and analysis tools including Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Database Management Systems (DBMS), and three dimensional visualization technologies, has vastly improved both the quantity and quality of data and analyses which can be used to support environmental decision making. The ability to efficiently apply such tools can make the difference between a costly process and a cost-effective one. In addition, such tools can assist in the integration of environmental data with operational data to help streamline a facility's business processes.
      In the manufacturing and processing industries, GIS applications for environmental engineering and regulatory compliance issues have only recently begun to be explored. One of the potential advantages of applying GIS-based methods at manufacturing facilities is the ability to better understand the impact of various manufacturing scenarios on the environment, and, conversely, to assess the impact of potential environmental constraints on manufacturing plans.
      The operations managers at industrial facilities also have a need to maintain information describing the construction, maintenance, and operation of their facilities. They may have already invested a significant amount of resources to develop databases or automated mapping systems to manage that information. In many cases, the information needs of environmental managers may overlap with the information required to maintain the proper operation of the facility.

Taking GIS to the Factory Floor
One of the primary uses of existing information systems technology in industrial facilities is Automated Mapping/Facilities Management (AM/FM) systems. An AM/FM system integrates database management and automated mapping technologies, allowing the user to capture, store, retrieve, and display facilities information graphically.
      For example, an automated mapping system may already exist at a manufacturing facility which includes the accurate locations, dimensions, and types of materials used in every pipeline designed to discharge wastewater, as well as the locations of outfalls, roads, buildings, and other infrastructure descriptions. By providing the environmental manager with the information technology necessary to access the available and relevant pipeline data, a better decision regarding wastewater discharge requirements can be made sooner at a lower cost to the company.
      A GIS takes the AM/FM concept one step further by providing tools for relating and analyzing the data spatially. The use of a GIS can greatly assist in the data integration, analysis, and display of environmental information. Information types used to describe the environment at a manufacturing facility can be considered in three levels for integration in a GIS; direct measurement and interpretive maps of environmental parameters, data from monitoring sources, and outputs from environmental models.
      Many environmental issues including site characterization, impact assessment, and site restoration; surface and subsurface hydrogeologic modeling; master planning and engineering design; compliance monitoring; analysis of soil and vegetation types; atmospheric dispersion modeling; and mapping of animal and population distributions can be cost-effectively addressed using GIS capabilities. The key reason is that most environmental factors have a common link, their geographic location. By incorporating the ability to manage environmental data based on geographical descriptors, the cognitive reasoning required for the decision maker is greatly enhanced through graphical representations of the data.
      A GIS also provides the ability to interrelate data elements derived from a variety of disparate sources. Some typical sources of data for environmental applications may include CAD drawings, aerial photographs, high-resolution satellite imagery, survey data, paper maps, well completion diagrams, lithologic descriptions, laboratory analyses, and many others which are beyond the scope of this discussion.

GIS Applications for Commercial Facilities
In addition to providing a geographic location that is linked to descriptive (tabular) data about a feature such as an air emission stack, a GIS provides spatial analysis capabilities that can greatly assist in the decision-making process. Spatial operators that are available in many GIS software packages are based on the fundamental concepts of distance, direction, and connectivity (topology). Boolean logic is combined with these basic concepts to derive additional operators including adjacency, proximity, superposition, containment, and so forth. Many of these spatial operators can be extremely useful in environmental decision support applications. For example, using a GIS one might wish to identify all monitoring wells that are adjacent to residential neighborhoods but are within the boundaries of a groundwater contaminant plume and are within one mile of a school.
      Stormwater management is another example where a GIS can prove useful for environmental decision support at industrial or commercial facilities. Compliance programs mandated by federal, state, or local regulations typically require the inventory of stormwater drainage systems, collection of water quality data, estimation of pollutant loads, and establishment of long-term stormwater monitoring. The spatial and temporal complexities inherent in assessing stormwater quality, and the ability to rapidly and economically analyze all the necessary information, play important roles in the success of stormwater management programs. Using a GIS for stormwater management is ideal for tasks such as calculating surface areas, integrating external models, determining land-use classifications, analyzing population density distributions, and producing maps and graphics.
      By defining what specific sources of information are needed to generate a particular map, report, or output product, the data layers necessary to support those decisions can be defined and documented. Other factors which should be taken into account include the timeliness of the information (i.e. frequency of updates) and the data accuracy and quality necessary to produce the desired output product.
      Adequately considering input data quality, which is typically expressed in terms of the degree of uncertainty that is acceptable for a specific data element, is critical to accurately assessing the results of analyses. In fact, one danger of using computer modeling and GIS capabilities is that some unskilled users and even technical experts may accept the results of complex models without proper validation, often judging solely by the cartographic excellence of the final output product.
      Using the effluent discharge example, let us assume that the EH&S manager is responsible for submitting a quarterly report to the state regulatory agency which indicates the locations and amounts of effluent which are discharged by plant operations during that period. In order to produce the report, the volume of effluent which is discharged by plant operations at each outfall during the three-month period must be reported to a level of accuracy that is within five gallons. Furthermore, the plant operations manager must review the report to ensure that it is consistent with his estimate for plant production capacity during that same period.
      The data layers or themes that would be necessary to develop this report might include the wastewater pipeline network (including daily pipeline capacity); outfall locations with any associated discharge measurements; sewers, sumps, or other entries into the pipelines; any incident reports during the three-month period which might indicate a break in a pipeline, non-functional monitoring device, or other factor that could influence an accurate measurement; and locations of settling ponds or effluent treatment facilities. There will probably be other parameters pertinent to each facility that are not common across the industry and will require additional consideration during the database design stage.

The Management Metric
According to independent consultant Gil Friend, (and I quite agree with his assessment): "Raw' data ... is of limited usefulness, since it provides little guidance for effective action. Any management metric (environmental or otherwise) is most meaningful when presented in relationship to something else: another metric or production factor, a change over time, comparable factors within the industry (benchmarking), etc.
      For that reason, any software used to compile and analyze operating metrics should make it convenient to exchange denominators in a 'what-if' excercise, ideally in collaboration with a variety of stakeholders."
      GIS software provides this ability to perform "what-if" scenarios and turn "raw" data into meaningful information. Clearly, the requirement for cost-effective information management will increase substantially in the future, especially as more businesses recognize the benefits of efficient environmental decision making. Furthermore, businesses may be required to demonstrate that the necessary systems (such as GIS) are in place to allow them to achieve the competitive advantage offered by the implementation of an EMS such as ISO 14001.

About the Author:
Damon Judd is a senior consultant and GIS project manager for Rust Environment & Infrastructure in their Denver office. He has 15 years experience in environmental applications of GIS and Remote Sensing. He was recently selected as co-editor of the Features section of the URISA Journal. He can be reached by telephone at 303-694-6660, by fax at 303-694-4410, or by e-mail at [email protected].

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