Anniversaries: ISO 14001 is 10

Stumbling across ISO 14001 certification figures a few days ago jogged my memory to the days when it was first released - I must admit that discovering 14001 was released 10 years ago this past June was a bit of shocker - time flies!

It was controversial back then. The standard had the backing of governments and many businesses were stongly incentivized to get on board with it. I remember when Ford and GM joined forces a year or two later and made it mandatory for any company providing products or services in their supply chain to become certified under ISO 14001.

But pushback came from companies and environmentalists who said that the standard was causing weaker performance - not stronger. Some companies in Japan, the US, and western Europe had already adhered to high levels of environmental management, and the ISO standard - built with wide global uptake in mind - actually lowered the bar instead of raising it. Of course, there were the to-be-expected complaints of cost and burden as well.

Some say that ISO 14000 has been a solution to many problems: unintentional trade barriers created by environmental standards; the inefficiency of command and control regulations; and the plethora of permits, inspections, regulations and standards faced by companies trading across international borders.

I think the standard has done much for environmental management overall - not the least by creating a standardized set of vocabulary, expectations, actions, and (10 years on) a worldwide infrastructure of practitioners that can help companies cope with their environmental risks.

But is it actually improving performance? Does anyone out there know of any studies or impact assessments of ISO 14000 certifications?

ISO 14001 - on the menu in Asia

I was somewhat surprised to find out that International Organization for Standardization (ISO) does not officially track the number of certifications to its 14001 environmental management standard. All these years I have been jealous of ISO assuming that they can track certifications with ease due to the compliance oriented nature of their standard. We are have always struggled to track the users of the Sustainability Reporting Guidelines because they are a flexible framework - certifications are not required, nor are companies required to inform GRI (or anyone else) when they have issued a report based on the Guidelines.

Anyway, I stumbled across some data from the German Environment Agency (UBA) while surfing the web this evening that seems to be the closest thing we have to a tally of total certifications. They tracked just over 129,000 certifications worldwide by the start of 2007 - they claim this figure represents a rise of about 25% from the previous year. I took that as a good sign that ISO 14000 is still growing that strongly.

Organizations in Asian countries account for over 45% of certifications globally - with Japan and China in the number 1 and 2 spots respectively (approximately 20,000 certifications each), and South Korea, India, Taiwan, and Thailand all in the top 20.

The ususal suspects from western Europe can be found in the top 20 as well - Spain (11,000 certifications - good for #3 spot), Italy, Germany, UK, Sweden, France, and Switzerland. But possibly more interesting is the appearance of some new CEE nations rounding out the bottom of the table - Romania, Czech Republic, and Hungary make the top 20 for the first time with a combined certification total of nearly 5000.

The USA is 5th on the list with 8000 certifications, and Canada is 11th with nearly 2600. No African companies made the top 20, but the survey shows that South Africa has over 400 certifications to-date.

I wonder if reporting rates will or do follow ISO certification rates. Has anybody out there seen any correlation?