Arabia

Environmental Management System (EMS) is the overall practices, procedures, processes and resources for developing, implementing, achieving, reviewing and maintaining the environmental policy of an organization to reduce its negative environmental impacts & improve operation efficiency. EMS has now gone beyond the traditional implementation at corporate level by industries and companies as cities, municipalities and universities embrace the system. This brings a shift of approach in EMS planning, implementation and management because cities and universities are bigger in size, more heterogeneous, and have more spatially-related activities and stake holders and diverse land uses than companies. As such, EMS implementation at university level becomes difficult without geographically referencing activities and land uses that have negative environmental impacts. A tool like GIS would be highly needed for tracking the environmental impacts of such activities and their locations using a spatially-related database, site and utilities plans, maintenance plans and records, etc. With GIS, relevant information regarding university environmental aspects or operations from multiple sources can be consolidated and easily accessed and manipulated. In this paper, a proposed GIS-Based EMS project for KFUPM is used to demonstrate these vital roles plays by GIS in efficient and effective planning, implementation and management of university EMS