AJEPP-02 environmental protection for NATO military camps

What it is

AJEPP-02, an Allied Joint Environmental Protection Publication, gives NATO commanders and environmental protection (EP) officers best practices and standards for limiting the environmental impact of deployed military camps during NATO-led operations. Nations record their agreement to use it in STANAG 2582; the actual authority a commander exercises to set EP procedures and direct compliance comes from a separate document, NATO's Military Principles and Policies for Environmental Protection (MC 0469). AJEPP-02 supplies the practices that authority is exercised through, not the authority itself. This is Edition B, Version 1, promulgated 7 November 2022, superseding an earlier edition nations were directed to destroy.

The publication is organised into nine annexes, each following the same shape: description of the situation, objectives, responsibilities, best practices and standards, and references. They cover infrastructure planning, energy management, water and waste water, solid and hazardous waste, petroleum/oils/lubricants (POL) and spill response, hazardous materials, air quality, natural resources, and cultural property. Expectations scale across three stages of a camp's life, initial, interim and sustainment, tied to the deployed-force-infrastructure tiers set out in STANAG 2632, and every annex's best-practice table becomes more comprehensive as a camp matures from a few tents to a multi-year base.

Who this addresses, and who it does not

The document names its own readers plainly: it exists to "provide NATO commanders and environmental protection (EP) officers with best EP practices and standards for military camps." Troop-contributing nations and other nations supplying materiel, equipment or infrastructure get the same publication, but as interoperability guidance rather than an obligation of their own. A supplier or contractor is never named as an addressee. Where a contractor shows up at all, it is as something the EP officer manages on the nation's behalf, for instance to help "participate in the preparation of contract EP requirements regarding water and waste water." AJEPP-02 reaches a company only because a specific camp-support, waste-management or fuel-handling contract writes its requirements in, or because a national authority directs its own forces to follow them - never because the publication applies to a contractor directly.

Its scope is narrow by design: it "is intended to apply only to deployed military camps during NATO operations," though a nation is free to extend it to domestic camps, exercises or non-NATO operations if it chooses. Host-nation law still governs inside an operation - the document requires that host-nation environmental laws "will be respected," while noting this means honouring the intent of that law rather than complying with every provision, and that AJEPP-02's own standards are only "the minimal level to be achieved" where a nation's own rules are stricter.

When to plan for it

The trigger for a support contractor is the same as for any Allied Publication: a tasking order, a base-support contract or a national directive that actually invokes it - and by then a camp is often already sited. AJEPP-02 puts real weight on doing the environmental work early, calling for EP aspects to be built into infrastructure planning "from the earliest stage of mission and camp development," because retrofitting water, waste and energy systems into an established camp costs far more than designing them in from the start. The later, more numeric requirements - waste water effluent limits, HAZMAT storage rules, incinerator ash limits - are the kind of detail a contractor needs in hand before quoting or building, not something to work out once equipment is on site. Camp closure carries its own separate trigger: an environmental closeout study is required at the conclusion of occupation, handover or transition, so exit obligations are not an afterthought.

AJEPP-02 does not stand alone. It assumes the deployed-force-infrastructure tiers in STANAG 2632 (ATP-3.12.1.4) are already in use to describe a camp's development stage, and it assumes the NATO Environmental File machinery in STANAG 6500 (AJEPP-6) is available, since the baseline study, closeout study, impact assessment and condition report templates it repeatedly calls for all live in that publication rather than this one.

What it requires

Infrastructure planning comes first because it is cheapest to get right early: an environmental baseline study must be conducted before or as soon as possible after occupying a site, documenting existing conditions and limiting liability for pre-existing contamination.

Energy management calls for an action plan built on baseline metering data, a commander's energy policy and identified critical energy uses, alongside concrete operation-and-maintenance practices such as regular air conditioner filter and coil cleaning to improve efficiency.

Water and waste water carries the publication's first hard numbers. A water management plan belongs in the camp's own Standard Operating Procedures (clause C.4.1), and treated effluent released from a camp must meet a minimum set of standards (clause C.4.7): BOD5 30 mg/L, chemical oxygen demand 125 mg/L, total suspended solids 35 mg/L, faecal coliform 400 per 100 mL, pH between 6 and 9, and total nitrogen 50 mg/L, among others. Direct discharge of untreated waste water into a natural water body is prohibited outright (clause C.4.5), and contracted waste water disposal has to be supervised and monitored through to the final disposal site (clause C.4.5).

Waste management sets a clear hierarchy - prevention, reuse, recycling, recovery, and disposal last (clause D.4.1) - with specific rules for individual streams. Incinerator ash is presumed hazardous waste unless laboratory analysis proves otherwise (clause D.4.3), and where an incinerator has no air cleaning, the ash has to meet its own limits (loss on ignition, electrical conductivity, pH, dissolved organic carbon and adsorbable organic halogens) (clause D.4.3). Health care waste gets a six-category separation scheme, each with its own container colour (clause D.4.5). The Annex is explicit that it does not cover classified material, warfare agents, explosive ordnance, ammunition, decontaminating agents, radioactive substances or maritime waste (clause D.1).

POL and spill response is the other annex with concrete numbers: storage areas need at least a 50-metre setback from surface water (clause E.4.3), and storage tanks need secondary containment sized to at least 110% of the tank's capacity (clause E.4.3). A spill becomes formally reportable at defined thresholds - as low as 50 litres for liquid POL or HAZMAT (clause E.4.5) - which gives a clear line rather than a judgment call.

HAZMAT, air quality, natural resources and cultural property round the publication out: pesticides should be applied by a qualified applicator (clause F.4.2); open-air burn pits need a minimum 610-metre standoff from living and work areas, and burning hazardous waste, batteries, tyres, electronic waste, munitions or health care waste in them is prohibited outright (clause G.4); identified habitats have to be captured in the baseline study (clause H.4); and cultural property, defined against the 1954 Hague Convention, may never be purchased, traded for or accepted as a gift by NATO troops (clause I.4).

How you are evaluated

There is no accreditation, certification body or notified-body scheme in AJEPP-02, and it never claims one. Its own definition of what a NATO "standard" means ties compliance to internal reporting, not external certification: where a mandatory requirement is not met, non-conformances are to be documented and reported up the chain of command. In practice, the EP officer carries this out directly - monitoring water and waste water quality, keeping monitoring records, maintaining a chemicals inventory with safety data sheets, and recording spill and remediation decisions in the NATO Camp Environmental File that STANAG 6500 standardises. The one place an outside accreditation scheme appears at all is testing: waste water testing should go to an ISO/IEC 17025 accredited laboratory - and that accredits the laboratory doing the analysis, not the camp or a contractor against AJEPP-02. For a camp-support or waste contractor, the practical check is a customer audit: whoever holds the contract verifies performance against whatever it wrote in from this publication, not against a NATO-run scheme.

Where it sits among NATO's environmental publications

AJEPP-02 is one of a family: STANAG 2583 (AJEPP-3) covers building an environmental management system into operations planning, STANAG 7141 (AJEPP-4) carries the broader EP doctrine and commanders' responsibilities this publication deliberately does not repeat, STANAG 6500 (AJEPP-6) defines the Environmental File and baseline/closeout study templates AJEPP-02 leans on throughout, and STANAG 2594 (AJEPP-7) covers sustainability of training areas. It also draws on the deployed-force-infrastructure framework in STANAG 2632 (ATP-3.12.1.4), on potable-water requirements kept deliberately out of scope and covered instead by STANAG 2136 (AMedP-4.9), and on civilian standards including ISO 14001 (the source of its "best practice" concept), ISO 50001 for energy management, and ISO/IEC 17025 for the accredited laboratories it recommends for waste water testing. The standards explorer has the rest, including the petroleum, medical-surveillance and dangerous-goods STANAGs the annexes cite for specialist detail.

AJEPP-02 is published by the NATO Standardization Office and, like every NATO standardization document, carries no charge. The NATO Standardization Document Database is the authoritative source; we credit NATO for the catalogue and neither sell nor host a copy ourselves.

Standards it references

• STANAG 2583Background
• AJEPP-03Background
• STANAG 7141Background
• AJEPP-04Background
• STANAG 6500Background
• AJEPP-06Background
• STANAG 2594Background
• AJEPP-07Background
• ISO 14001Background
• STANAG 2632Background
• STANAG 2136Background
• ATP-3.12.1.4Background
• STANAG 2238Background
• AJP-3.12Background
• STANAG 2394Background
• ATP-3.12.1Background
• ISO 50001Background
• STANAG 2561Background
• AJMedP-4Background
• ISO/IEC 17025Background
• AMedP-4.9Background
• AJP-4Background
• STANAG 2048Background
• STANAG 2535Background
• STANAG 2536Background
• AJP-4.7Background
• STANAG 3784Background
• STANAG 7102Background
• AMedP-4.2Background
• STANAG 3712Background
• STANAG 4441Background
• AMovP-06Background
• STANAG 2557Background
• AMedP-4.11Background