Boosting Regulations Legislation Reliefs Regarding Environmental Management Systems in the Framework of EMAS and ISO 14001: Case Study of Cyprus

Environmental Management Systems (EMS) defining a list of requirements that can help organizations to improve their environmental performance. The most common well-known standards are ISO 14001 and EMAS, which both are in a voluntary base. Beside the National Legislation in Cyprus (N.761/2001) there is no any relief document that introduced EMAS Regulation (EC) N. 1221/2009. However, there is an increasing pressure on firms, from a number of different sources (i.e. global market requirements, legislative indirect pressure, customer’s satisfaction etc.), to engage in environmental management initiatives. The aim of this study is to evaluate the incentives as well as the difficulties that Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs) which are located in Cyprus and other European countries (i.e. Italy, Chez Republic and Slovenia) that are facing during the implementation of EMS. The preliminary results indicated that in the case of Cyprus, there are not any specific regulatory reliefs besides some funding programs to convince SMEs to implement and maintain EMAS as well as ISO 14001. On the other hand, in several EU countries there are some more solids measures to encourage SMEs to adopt EMAS.