STATE AGENCY ENCOURAGES EMS ADOPTION THROUGH PARTNERSHIPS

The North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources' Environmental Stewardship Initiative encourages regulated organizations to adopt an environmental management system. The ESI program provides technical assistance and training for partner organizations who commit to development of an EMS and have established incentives for organizations to strengthen the EMS and encourage superior environmental performance through adoption of aggressive performance goals, activities that go beyond compliance, communication with the local community regarding environmental issues and integration of the EMS in core business functions. Through these partnerships, the ESI program has developed experience with the implementation of these systems in government agencies and found that implementation issues and benefits of EMS can be quite different than those in the private sector.