Environmental Aspect Assessment

Environmental management answers one question per process activity: what does this do to the environment, how significant is it, and what are we doing about it?

An aspect is the interaction — an emission, a discharge, a consumption. An impact is what that interaction causes. A record here pairs one aspect with one impact, arising in one process, at one life cycle stage, under one operating condition, and scores it.

The module's subject is a process, not a place. That is what makes it answer an ISO 14001 auditor's actual question: not "what emissions do you have" but "which of your activities produce them, and have you assessed all of them".

The six-part key

A record is uniquely identified by six things together:

Part	Why it is part of the key
Main form	The register. Two registers may legitimately assess the same thing for different scopes.
Process	Which activity produces the aspect.
Life cycle stage	The same aspect at supply and at end-of-life are different assessments.
Aspect	What the interaction is.
Impact	What it causes. One aspect can cause several impacts, each assessed on its own.
Operating condition	Normal, abnormal and emergency are the classic three, and they score differently.

note

The process step is deliberately not part of the key. The same aspect arising in three steps of one process is one record, not three. The step is recorded as free text on the record — useful for a reader, never a key.

The reason is durable: process step identities are renewed whenever a process is revised, so a key pointing at a step would break every time the process changed. The link is to the process chain, which survives revision.

The building blocks

Concept	Purpose
Main form	The register, with its code template, its authorization matrix and the processes it covers. See Main Forms.
Aspect assessment	The record: the six-part key, the scoring, the control methods and obligations.
Scoring	Severity × probability × legal status, resolved to a score and a band. See Scoring.
Environmental action	The measure a significant aspect waits on. See Environmental Actions.
Catalogues	Aspects, impacts, control methods, compliance obligations, life cycle stages and operating conditions. See Catalogues.

The record

• Code — issued from the main form's code template.
• Main form — the register this record belongs to.
• Process — chosen from what the main form covers and what you are allowed to open.
• Process step — free text. What part of the process this arises in.
• Life cycle stage, aspect, impact, operating condition — the rest of the key.
• Aspect direction — negative or positive. See below.
• Control degree — whether the organization controls this aspect or merely influences it.
• Control methods — how it is controlled. Multi-select.
• Compliance obligations — which legal, contractual or corporate requirements apply. Multi-select.
• Severity / probability / legal status — the scoring inputs.
• Environmental score / band — calculated and stored.
• Significant aspect — settled when the record is scored. See below.
• Responsibles — who is accountable. The approval step raises its task from this.
• Notes and attachments.

Three fields that are recorded, not calculated

Control degree — controlled or influenced. An organization controls its own boiler; it merely influences what a supplier does upstream. Both belong in the register, and the distinction is what stops a review treating them as equally actionable.

Aspect direction — negative or positive. Most aspects are negative, but ISO 14001 recognizes beneficial ones — a process that recovers waste, or reduces consumption. See below.

Process step name — free text on purpose, as above.

A beneficial aspect is not scored at all

A positive aspect does not score zero. It is not scored:

• The three scoring fields are cleared and hidden.
• The flow skips the control, waiting and verification steps entirely — there is nothing to control, nothing to measure, nothing to verify.
• Approving the record puts it straight into force.

note

This is the right shape. A beneficial aspect belongs in the register because the register is the organization's account of its environmental interactions, and leaving the good ones out makes it an account of only the bad ones. But scoring it on a severity scale would produce a number that means nothing, and parking it on a verification step would ask somebody to confirm measures nobody took.

Significance, and its two routes

Significant aspect is what the whole register is read for — it is the list an ISO 14001 audit asks to see.

A record becomes significant in either of two ways:

1. Through the band. The score lands in a band whose definition marks it significant.
2. Through legal status. A legal status level can be defined as making the aspect significant on its own, regardless of what the arithmetic came to.

The second route exists because a numeric legal limit whose breach carries a sanction is significant whether or not the probability is low. See Scoring.

Significance is stored when the record is scored. Editing a band definition afterwards cannot move what a closed record was approved on.

The process link, seen from the record

Three fields hold the link, and each answers a different question:

Field	Answers
Process	Which process chain this is — the key, the picker's narrowing, the coverage report.
Which revision was assessed	The audit trail: the process revision as it stood when the assessment was made.
Process name	What the process was called at the time, so a rename later leaves the record readable.

The picker is narrowed twice — to the processes the main form covers, and to the processes you personally hold record-level permission on. The same filter runs on save, so nothing can be posted past it.

Creating a record

1. Open Environmental Management → Records and pick the main form.
2. Choose New.
3. Select the process, and type the step if it is worth recording.
4. Set the life cycle stage, aspect, impact and operating condition — the key.
5. Set the aspect direction. If it is positive, you are nearly done.
6. Set the control degree, and name the responsibles.
7. Send for approval.

Scoring, control methods and compliance obligations are filled in at the control step, after approval — not here. See Lifecycle.

tip

Work one process at a time, walking its life cycle stages in order. The register's value comes from being complete for the processes it covers, and completeness is much easier to see per process than per aspect.