generation, water and fuel consumption, making regular import
of large data sets into the EIS convenient. Altogether this clearly
indicates several advantages compared to simple registration and
reporting data sheets like Microsoft excel.
For benefit of the reader, Fig. 3 has been included to visualize
what the Teams SR system looks like, exemplified with registration
of solid waste generation. The registration of waste master
data is shown in the left box. The right box shows the registration
of waste generated at the level of inventory/building in a military
base camp. The transactions data may be automatically imported
in the database from excel sheets generated by the waste companies,
or manually registered by authorized personnel. Output tables
can then be generated to summarize amounts of waste generation
per year e.g. for the individual building, the military base camp, or
for the whole defence sector. Information on treatment of waste
(e.g. amount of waste for recycling) may also be acquired from the
output tables.
One major improvement of the EIS could be integration with a
Geographical Information System (GIS). GIS uses spatio-temporal
location as the key index variable for all information. Any variable
that can be located spatially, and partly also temporally, can be
referenced. Related by accurate spatial information, a variety of
real-world and projected past or future data can be analyzed, interpreted
and represented to facilitate reporting and decision making,
in particular if integrated with a system like Teams. This could allow
environmental surveillance data to be combined with e.g. use of
ammunition in a shooting field, making it more convenient to control
the impact of local contamination like heavy metal deposition
and also to keep an overview over biotic communities and national
cultural heritage sites and the changes/disturbances connected to
sector activities.
Further improvements to both the selected indicators and the
EIS system would be to include calculations and indicators showing
the relative (percentage) changes. Including this in the EIS system
would render it possible to see the relative changes down to
the lower levels of the organization which will make the process
of identifying areas of concern much easier. Additionally, implementation
of statistical functions in the EIS system might be able
to improve the application, in particular in cases where historical
comparisons between complex data sets are warranted.
As previously mentioned in Section 1, it should be pointed
out that there are few similar works available for other countries’
defence sectors, i.e. studies that evaluate the sectorial environmental
performance at a national level. Despite this, some attempts
to make comparisons with other military forces have been conducted,
keeping in mind limitations related to the objectives and
scope of the works, including sector size and social–cultural differences
as well as particular data gathering, processing and treatment
procedures.
4. Conclusions
At present there is significant diversity in the indicator frameworks
available for evaluating environmental and sustainability
performance for defence sectors. Some of the previous work conducted
for the defence sector has not used any formal indicator
framework, developing just a list of individual indicators without
any particular type of methodological support to structure them
and their respective data sources.
In the present research, a novel approach, the sectorial environmental
performance indicator information system (SEPIIS)
framework is presented, incorporating an EIS as monitoring tool for