The European Unions Eco Management And Audit Scheme Emas PDF Download

Many environmental issues, such as addressing climate change and encouraging sustainability, have transcended existing statutory schemes, causing regulators and scholars to evaluate alternative regulatory mechanisms. One area of focus has been the potential for using environmental management systems (EMSs) as a way to leverage governmental regulation of operations that impact the environment. An EMS is a systematic planning, implementation and review process that organizations use to continuously improve environmental performance. While there is some literature on the impact that regulations incorporating EMSs have had, almost nothing has been written from a comparative viewpoint. This Article analyzes what role EMSs have played in governmental regulation by comparing the two of the most prominent governmental programs based on EMSs: the European Commission's Eco-Management and Audit Scheme (EMAS) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Performance Track program. This comparison is especially useful because governmental regulators in the European Union and the United States took opposite approaches with respect to those programs. The European Union continues to develop and promote EMAS while the United States withdrew its Performance Track program in 2009. The Article concludes that there is strong potential for EMS-based regulations to produce significant environmental performance and compliance benefits, and that more should be done in the United States to evaluate lessons learned from Performance Track as well as EMAS developments. Some the of major benefits, such as risk management, avoidance of negative incidents and external engagement, are hard to quantify but could provide the basis for transforming current adversarial relationships among regulated facilities, regulators and other stakeholders into more productive collaborative governance relationships.