Organizations which intend to obtain environmental certification following the international standards ISO 14001 and the European Emas regulations are required to evaluate their environmental performance and to demonstrate its continuous improvement in accord to sustainable development principles. Thus getting and maintaining environmental certification needs the employment of methodologies to monitor systems' environmental performance through time. Emas suggests adopting indicators to measure the evolution of the organizations' environmental status. Dealing with complex systems, such as Siena province, common indicators (i.e. analytical pollution measures) are not sufficient to consider all the involved environmental aspects. "Macro" indicators able to evaluate the global environmental performance of the organization are needed. Here we propose sustainability indicators given from different thermodynamic methodologies such as emergy analysis, CO_2 balance calculation and ecological footprint to monitor on a large-scale the environmental performance of Siena province. Due to their systemic character and their holistic approach, these indicators successfully fit to assess the environmental performance of such a complex system for environmental certification.
展开▼
