New ISO 14001: verdict in December 2022

The survey conducted in fall 2021 does not allow for a revision of the flagship standard for environmental management systems. ISO will make a decision at a later date, in light of the analysis of additional elements.

Like ISO 9001 on quality management, the latest version of the voluntary ISO 14001 standard on environmental management dates back to 2015, and six years later, the time has come to decide whether or not it needs to be revised. Indeed, all voluntary standards are bound to evolve in order to meet the expectations of economic actors and the realities of the markets.

In fall 2021, we invite you to respond to a survey by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) on whether or not to revise the voluntary ISO 14001 standard, which was then celebrating its 25th anniversary. More than 5,000 responses were received by the ISO technical subcommittee (ISO/TC 207/SC 1) responsible for this topic, under British leadership. Most came from experienced users of the current standard, from organizations with more than 500 employees, who are already familiar with ISO 14001 and ISO 9001. France was the fifth country to provide the most responses, after Germany, the United Kingdom, Poland, and the United States.

Response in December 2022

Verdict: the revision will not happen immediately. "On January 13, 2022, in light of the responses, the subcommittee decided that there was no consensus on whether or not to revise ISO 14001. The decision will therefore be postponed until the next plenary meeting of the committee, i.e. in December 2022," announced Lina Ismail, who coordinated the work for AFNOR on behalf of France. On the one hand, an Anglo-Saxon bloc is pushing for a revision; on the other, several countries such as Canada, Malaysia, and Belgium see little point in doing so at this stage.

Although ISO 14001 is widely used in Europe and North America, many countries in other parts of the world are only just beginning to adopt the standard and are therefore calling for confirmation of the 2015 version. Furthermore, the preliminary work carried out by ISO needs to be analyzed in greater detail. Work will therefore continue this year, postponing its conclusion until the next plenary meeting of ISO/TC 207/SC 1.

In the meantime, the current version of the standard fully fulfills its role as a guideline for implementing an environmental management system, and it would be a shame to procrastinate! Our AFNOR BAO experts are ready to assist you in this task, on an ad hoc basis.

When asked, "What issues would you encourage the ISO committee to address in revising the standard?", the most common response was "identifying environmental aspects in the supply chain or at other stages of the life cycle." Forty-three percent of respondents believe that this is the area where the standard should propose new measures. The verdict will be of interest to many environmental managers in France and around the world. In 2020, France had 6,458 active ISO 14001 certificates, covering more than 54,000 sites. Worldwide, the ISO counted nearly 350,000 active certificates that year, compared to 312,000 a year earlier ( source: Iso Survey 2021 ).