Environmental Management Information Systems (EMIS) for Sustainable Development: A Conceptual Overview

Environmental management information systems (EMIS) is defined as ‘organizational-technical systems for systematically obtaining, processing, and making available relevant environmental information available in companies’. Such systems evolved out of a growing need to manage environmental information in response to internal and external pressures such as regulations, consumers, stockholders, and changes in the business environments. While over the past decade EMIS have proliferated in the corporate landscape, these systems have received little attention within the information systems research community as whole. The objective of this paper is to serve as a tutorial providing a conceptual overview of EMIS, highlighting organizational and technical issues, as well as research opportunities. In this paper we suggest that there are significant and relatively untapped research synergies existing between information systems and environmental management for sustainable development at the organizational and technical levels.