Context asks you to start by understanding your organization and its context before you develop its environmental management system (EMS). It asks you to consider the external and internal issues that are relevant to your organization's purpose and to think about the influence these issues could have on its EMS and the results it intends to achieve. It also asks you to identify the interested parties that are relevant to your EMS and to consider the compliance obligations that they expect you to meet. Why? Because your EMS will need to be able to manage all these influences and obligations. Once you have considered all of this, you are ready to define the scope of your EMS and to begin its development.

Leadership asks your organization's top management to provide leadership for its EMS by accepting responsibility for it, by showing that they support it, and by providing resources. It also expects them to ensure that an environmental policy

is formulated, that environmental objectives are established, that compliance obligations are acknowledged, that environmental aspects and impacts are considered, and that EMS roles, responsibilities, and authorities are assigned.

Planning starts by asking you to develop a process to consider the risks that could affect your organization's EMS. It then asks you to use this risk planning process to figure out how to address your context, to handle your interested parties, to meet your compliance obligations, to deal with your significant environmental aspects and impacts, and to manage your risks and opportunities. And once you have done all of this it expects you to define actions to address your significant environmental aspects, your compliance obligations, and your risks and opportunities. Then, to make sure that all these actions will be carried out, it asks you to build them into your EMS processes. While this is a lot of planning, you are not done yet. Section 6 also expects you to set environmental objectives at all relevant levels and for all relevant functions, to develop actions to achieve these objectives, and then to figure out how you're going to integrate all of these actions into your organization's processes.

Support asks you to support your EMS by providing resources, by ensuring the people are competent, by making them aware of their EMS responsibilities, by controlling EMS communications, and by managing EMS documents and records (documented information). In this context, it asks you to start by figuring out how extensive your documentation should be. Once you have figured this out, it asks you to select, include, and control all of the documents and records that your EMS needs.

Operations asks you to establish your EMS processes and to control how they operate. It asks you to plan how you're going to implement and control the processes that you need in order to meet EMS requirements and in order to implement the actions that were previously built into these processes (in section 6). It asks you to plan how you're going to implement and control the actions that must be taken in order to meet your compliance obligations, to achieve your environmental objectives, to deal with your significant environmental aspects, and to manage the risks and opportunities that could influence your environmental performance. Finally, it asks you to prepare for potential emergency situations and to establish a procedure to respond to these situations when they occur.

Evaluation asks you to monitor, measure, analyze, and evaluate your organization's environmental performance and compliance and to audit your EMS at planned intervals. It also asks you to carry out management reviews; it asks you to review the suitability, adequacy, and effectiveness of your EMS, to generate appropriate outputs, and to document your results.

Improvement asks you to identify opportunities and to take all necessary actions to improve your EMS. It asks you to control nonconformities, to take corrective actions, and to enhance the suitability, adequacy, and effectiveness of your EMS.