Establish your baseline

Data management - the importance to your program

Data collection is an important part of you environment program providing the basis for your organisation to effectively tackle its environmental impacts.  

Data collection allows you to:

• establish a baseline for your impacts
• benchmark your organisation against other similar organisations
• effectively set targets and monitor the effectiveness of different environmental initiatives
• report on progress (internally and externally)
• develop a business case for particular initiatives
• report on government environmental targets.

Set up a data management system

A useful data management system provides you with information on how you are tracking against reducing your environmental impacts.  To get an idea of what you should be collecting, the first step is to complete an Aspects and Impacts register for your operations (there's a template and advice for this below).  Once you have outlined your impacts you can then work out what data you have, or need to have to track your progress.

Data collection flowchart

You also need to normalise your data to make sense of results should your operations change significantly.  For example, you can calculate your energy use by FTE or metered squared to allow for comparison of energy data over time should your agency grow or shrink.

Your data collection system should also help you decide how your reduction targets should be expressed, for example if you are collecting energy use by square meter your target should reflect this: e.g. your target would read "reducing kWh per square meter by 20% on the baseline by 2011".  Analysis of trends in your historical data should also guide you to set realistic targets for reduction.

Once you have your data system set up you can then use the data you collect to build interest in your programs through data reports to your executive or other stakeholders.

About the tools on this page

The ResourceSmart reporting template (downloadable below) can assist you in completing the data reporting requirements of the ResourceSmart government program.  It allows you to track and calculate the environmental impact of your agency's energy, transport, waste and paper use.

The Organisational impacts register template allows you to organize and prioritize your agency's environmental impacts. Once you have identified the different environmental aspects and impacts of the functions and activities of your agency, it is time to collect data that measures the scale of these aspects and impacts.

The Environmental mapping, aspects and impacts and Collect data and establish a baseline fact sheets provide further information on how to set up a good data management system.