The revised version of ISO 14001, the international standard for environmental management, is on target for 2015 (albeit with a slight delay of course). We reported back in 2012 that the update was due in January 2015, but this has now been delayed until approx June 2015.
The reason for this delay is that when the committee draft CD was published in March 2013, it received too many comments from national committees about its contents, therefore the technical subcommittee (ISO TC/207) is now having to review these comments and decide if they should be added to the new standard. In excess of 250,000 companies use the ISO 14001 standard worldwide, therefore they have to get it right.
Another important change in this next revision is the inclusion of something called ANNEX SL. For those that don’t know what Annex SL is, in brief it is a new ISO standard that was introduced so that all new and revised ISO standards must now follow a universal high level structure in order to make them easier to implement. For full details please read our article on What is Annex SL?
What are the changes
We have listed below some of the key changes that are in the CD & DIS drafts, but as the revision process is still on going there could be further technical wording changes before the revision is published at the end of 2015:
- The entire standard will be based on the core high level text of Annex SL
- A enhanced focus on environmental performance improvement
- Make top management have a better understanding of the organisations environmental issues, and make them integrate this as a business process rather than an afterthought
- A need to make commitments to sustainable development and social responsibility (ISO 26000)
- Transparency and accountability in environmental management issues and performance
- Clarification of the clause for improving environmental performance
- Communicate the approach to and mechanism of achieving legal compliance in ISO 14001 (e.g. in the Annex)
- Addressing the concept of demonstrating knowledge and understanding of the organisation’s compliance status
- Provide clearer guidance in Annex A to avoid misinterpretation of the requirements
It has also been suggested that the technical subcommittee to into consideration guidance issued by the European Committee for Standardization’s (CEN Guide 17) that when writing standards you should take account of micro, small and medium-sized enterprise (SMEs) needs – i.e. it is not just a standard for large companies, help smaller companies embrace the revised standard.
What do these changes mean to me?
Whether you are the environmental manager or an auditor (or both), there will obviously be many changes that need to be made to your systems in order to meet the requirements of the revised standard, but until further information becomes available it is hard to say exactly what, although you will probably have 2 years from the final version being published to transition to the new standard (based on previous standards).
ISO 14001 transition training
Don’t despair, Batalas will be running transition training courses which will teach you everything you need to know about the new standard. We cannot give a date for this yet, but as soon as more info is available we will update this page.
What is Annex SL?
