Descriptive Model of Indicators for Environment, Health and Safety Management

Management of systems requires, amongst many other things, a thorough and continuous understanding of the actual system's state and its development trends. To do so, managers need to rely on both descriptive and explicative models of the system's strengths and weaknesses. One of the means to do so are indicators. Widely developed in all areas of management (financial, economic, logistics), Environment Health and Safety (EHS), seen by management science, are also to be approached using indicators. One can find in literature multiple references and guidelines on how to develop and/or use indicators for EHS management. Without being exhaustive, OECD, IAEA, and CCPS are examples of well known international guidelines suggesting indicators for various or specific business areas regarding all or some of the EHS dimensions. In this paper, we will see that it is particularly difficult for decision makers to select the right indicators for their organization amongst dozens of various references and hundreds of indicators. We will also see that the main difficulty in this selection process is the multiple dimensions to be considered when assessing the relevance of an indicator. As a first answer, this paper will suggest a formal descriptive model of an EHS indicator. This model will present what we consider as necessary descriptive features for every EHS indicator so to help decision makers answering a simple question: is this indicator good or not for my organization? 1