Theoretical And Empirical Research On The Performance Assessment Of Corporate Environmental Management

In China, the low efficiency of utilizing resources and too large quantity of wastesgenerated in all kinds of organization has become major obstacle to harmonious, andsustainable development. It seems to be an important and indispensable approach toencourage organizations to take proactive attitude to carry out environmentalmanagement in order to solve this problem. It is generally recognized that establishingan environmental management system (EMS) is helpful for an organization toeffectively implement environmental management and to continually improve itsenvironmental performance (EP). However, we cannot reach a definite conclusion onthe relationship between EMS and EP based on the existing literatures. Therefore,according to the environmental management practices of some organizations in China,this dissertation is going to establish appropriate methods for measuring EP, to furtherassess whether or not implementing an EMS in an organization can contribute to theimprovement of its EP, to analyze the key influencing factors of EP, and finally toprovide some suggestions to organizations for the sake of implementing environmentalmanagement effectively. The main investigations and results of this study are asfollows:1. Review relevant literatures and find out the environmental practices on a wholein the universities in Zhejiang province and hotels around China. Based upon thepreliminary researches, it is then decided to investigate the linkage between EMS andEP and the main influencing factors of EP through examining the water and electricitymanagement of the universities and the movement of establishing the green hotels inZhejiang province.2. Develop new approaches for measuring environmental performance indicator(EPI) and EP, with consideration for the requirement that both physical impact on theenvironment of an environmental aspect and how society perceives this have to be takeninto account when evaluating EPI and EP, and for the need of observing EPI for threeyears and above. Afterward, EPIs and EP of the universities and the green hotels inZhejiang province have been measured respectively.3. Propose a new method for verifying the effectiveness of a mode ofenvironmental management when we can only obtain EPIs of organizations that havealready had environmental management in place. It proves that, as a whole, most of theEPIs of the green hotels in Zhejiang province had been improved continually as theycarry out environmental management in light of EMS, and the universities in Zhejiangprovince did not achieve significant fulfillment since they adopt existing managementmode to manage water and electricity consumption. So, this finding strongly suggeststhat implementing an EMS in an organization can contribute to the improvement of itsEP. 4. Examine main factors that might influence EP of the universities and the greenhotels in Zhejiang province. The findings are: to guarantee the existence of allenvironmental management elements and to execute the elements repeatedly are thefoundation for improving EP; the pressure and the assistance from key stakeholders arethe essential driving force for an organization to enhance its EP; it is a precondition forimproving EP that the management objectives of an organization containsenvironmental targets; organization paying attention to economic profits or long-termdevelopment is an important source for energizing itself to improve EP; it is a guaranteefor achieving a higher level of EP to adopt proper management strategies andapproaches.5. Put forward several key issues to that attention should be paid for the sake ofeffectively implementing environmental management. The top management of anorganization should fully recognize the necessity of establishing an EMS, should followand support the operation of EMS continuously, should try to obtain professional helpand instruction from outside, and should attach great importance to environmentalmanagement strategies and approaches. Besides, governments should make more use ofeconomic measures to prod all sorts of organizations to implement environmentalmanagement.