Environmental management system (EMS) is defined as follows:

That portion of the overall management system which addresses the structure, planning activities, responsibilities, practices, procedures, processes and resources that an organization must possess to develop, implement, carry out, review and maintain its environmental policy.

Quite rightly, Transport Canada’s overall management system includes economic, social, safety, human resource, budgetary resource and, finally, sustainable development concerns.

The environmental management system has 6 inter-related parts:

• Management commitment
• environmental policy
• planning
• implementation and operation
• checking and corrective action
• management review

The figure below illustrates the EMS implementation, maintenance and improvement process, which is dynamic and continuous.

Choose a step for a description.

The 6 boxes represent the 6 EMS implementation steps. Each step must be carried out in the order it appears, in keeping with the arrows. The diagram represents a closed loop, illustrating that the process is continuously being improved. The fact that the loop is spiral-shaped shows that with the evolution resulting from the move from one cycle to another, the scope of work to be done tends to decrease.

Pamphlet : A Quality Environment at Transport Canada is available in PDF format (Portable Document Format, file size 128 KB) which will download in approximately 100 seconds on a 28.8 connection and may be viewed using Adobe® Acrobat Reader version 3.0 or higher. This reader may be downloaded free of charge by visiting the Adobe® web site.