Cloud-based infrastructure for managing and analyzing environmental resources

Abstract

Companies are being required to manage and reduce their emissions to address the climate change problem. It is quite important to correctly monitor and calculate emissions from business activities for reliable emissions trading. Some programs for monitoring or calculations have been developed, but we believe that the IT system needs to manage emissions considering the entire energy management cycle, not just monitoring. We propose a Cloud-based energy management system that allows us to manage emissions according to the full cycle and output emissions reports in the XBRL format. These emissions results have been used as new evaluation indices with financial numbers. Applying XBRL to emissions reporting makes it easy to combine emissions data and financial numbers, and hence it is especially beneficial for interested third parties. We give an example of advanced analysis using emissions and financial data extracted from XBRL. Our approach can also be extended to other kinds of environmental resource management beyond emissions, such as water management. © 2011 IEEE.