The rise of environmental compliance and how to navigate it
Environmental professionals are navigating a deluge of environmental data coming in. Pair this with a rise in regulatory requirements and increasing stakeholder scrutiny, and without the systems and processes in place to manage this data, environmental professionals are stuck spending valuable time and resources wrangling their data into shape to support operational decisions and comply with a myriad of business and regulatory reporting requirements.
We sat down with Stuart van de Water, Environmental Leader at acQuire, to explore what companies can do today to ensure they’re managing their environmental compliance well – leaving no environmental data behind and keeping up to date with regulatory changes, while staying ahead of their competition.
Q: Stuart, what types of environmental data are being captured and what industries rely on this information?
Environmental data is multidisciplinary; it can come from just about anywhere and depending on what regulatory requirements your company needs to adhere to; ultimately determines the type and frequency of environmental data you need to capture.
Environmental professionals capture an array of data, from water, soil or air quality, through to specific flora identification and fauna behaviour, or waste and emissions from a site or operation. It’s a lot to manage.
Any industry or operation that has a sufficient capacity to impact the environment through its operations, will need to collect and report a certain amount of environmental data. This can extend from mining and resources, to airports, port authorities, processing plants and even universities for research purposes. So not only is environmental data broad, but it also impacts a lot of industries.
Q: Apart from reporting purposes, why is managing environmental data so critical to companies?
Efficient management of environmental data gives companies the confidence in their forecasting and decision-making when assessing current impact and determining the future impact their activities have on the local community and surrounding areas. It can also prevent costly disruptions, such as halting operations to avoid harm to surrounding wildlife and ecosystems, and ensure safety, such as monitoring water quality data for drinking water on a mine site. Similarly, tracking local rainfall can be crucial for operational safety, such as evacuating a mine site during heavy rain. Poor data management practices can lead to severe health and safety consequences.
“Efficient management of environmental data gives companies the confidence in their forecasting and decision-making when assessing current impact and determining the future impact their activities have on the local community and surrounding areas.”
Further, transparency of this environmental data can go a long way to fostering trust with local communities. Companies that proactively managing their environmental impact and offer transparent information around their activities can make a genuine impact.
Q: What is the best way to capture and store environmental data?
That answer is easy: a single source of truth.
You’ve got numerous sources collecting data across different types of monitoring programs, all at differing frequencies. This may include people in the field collecting physical samples and observations, data sent away to a laboratory for analysis, and sensor data coming from devices in real-time. Whether its data captured each second or once-a-quarter, capturing every piece of data into a single source of truth will improve on the efficiency and consistency of your environmental reporting and analysis, and help companies find correlations between datasets. Having a solution to capture this data ensures that all your data is all accounted for, equally and efficiently.
“…capturing every piece of data into a single source of truth will improve on the efficiency and consistency of your environmental reporting and analysis, and help companies find correlations between datasets.”
You can then take this a step further and look at providing a community portal or an avenue for the community to log in and see data on your recent environmental activities, rather than waiting for the obligatory reporting period. This fosters trust and builds relationships with your surrounding communities.
Q: How can sites improve their environmental data management to gain operational benefits and efficiency advantages over competitors?
There are some real basic data management practices that people can do to get their data in shape now, so they can spend less time wrangling their data and more time analysing it. Here are three ways to get started:
- Look at what format you’re getting your data. You’re receiving data from all these different monitoring programs, in their own sets of obligations and requirements, stored in emails, at labs, in Excel sheets across different databases and teams. Start by engaging with your data providers to streamline the formats you receive your data in. Then seek opportunities to automate any data collection to reduce manual handling and freeing up your time for other business-critical activities.
- Clean and organise your datasets. Maintaining a clean and organised dataset, that is both auditable and traceable, gives you the ability to identify and tackle any issues promptly and efficiently. Having access to transparent and organised data also aids in decision-making and regulatory reporting.
- Check for gaps in your data. There is a high chance that when you start assessing your data for gaps, you’ll find them. You may find data that hasn’t been organised properly or isn’t being managed anywhere. Rest assured this challenge is not unique to you; environmental data is broad, and this challenge is common. It’s a matter of constantly assessing your datasets for these gaps (preferably automatically), to ensure they’re discovered in a timely manner and to mitigate the likelihood of this happening again in the future.
Where does EnviroSys, acQuire’s environmental data management solution, fit in?
EnviroSys enables you to consolidate all your environmental information into a single source of truth so you can manage all your environmental monitoring programs in one place – leaving no data left behind.
Adopting a robust data management solution such as EnviroSys ensures your data is transparent and auditable so you can answer the question “am I compliant?” anytime and anywhere.
Learn more about EnviroSys by watching our demo here >
