It has been a busy couple of months for the ISS Team with many councils moving through to the TBL Tools Module of the program and several sustainability workshops taking place in Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia.
In addition, we are working with councils in New South Wales and South Australia to develop decision-making and sustainability assessment tools that will help them further integrate sustainability into their organisations.
ISS is also currently in the process of developing a sustainability assessment tool with funding from Sustainability Victoria, which will help local councils identify where they are on the sustainability pathway.
Congratulations to the Barossa Council, which received its TBL Program recognition certificate at the National Congress of Local Government Managers Australia on 26 May.
ISS also celebrated the achievements and ongoing sustainability work of local governments with World Environment Day on 5 June. ISS would like to commend the work of all TBL councils who have already taken bold steps to protect the environment and influence their communities to 'kick' many unsustainable habits through local action.
John Collins recently presented an ISS workshop at the second National EMS Conference, held in Newcastle, NSW, on 19–20 May, discussing how to fit Environment Management System (EMS) reporting into a sustainability reporting framework.
An EMS is a tool for managing the impacts of an organisation's activities on the environment.
John’s workshop session aimed to challenge environmental professionals to use sustainability reporting as a means of communicating the outcomes of their hard work on the environment to their key stakeholders.
His presentation examined the benefits of reporting and how reporting as a business management tool for EMS can help inform strategic planning, manage risk, engage stakeholders and enhance reputation.
Participants also learnt how open and transparent sustainability reporting can help their organisation demonstrate leadership, promote open and transparent governance as well as increase efficient resource use and reduce overall operating costs.
The enthusiastic feedback to the workshop session indicated that it had been informative and useful.
