Environmental Management Information Systems: A Conceptual Overview and Review of Vendors

Organizations need relevant and specific information systems to operate their carbon emissions, energy use, and other green activities to support its management of sustainability initiatives and related accounting and other reporting requirements. Green information systems (IS) and environmental management information systems (EMIS) thus become necessary for monitoring and controlling activities and procedures regarding environmental concerns. In the IS scholarly community, we have not yet given full attention to carbon management and environmental management IS, despite our increasing efforts in research around green information systems. In this paper, we aim to introduce the concepts of environmental management information systems by discussing some of their common software characteristics, such as whether support for ISO 14001 is provided. We provide an overview of a collection of such green and sustainable information systems and will discuss thoughts on directions for conducting IS research on these topics at the conference