Dear Customer,
On February 22, 2024, the International Accreditation Forum (IAF) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) decided to add two new textual expressions to a series of existing management system standards and to include them in all new standards under development/revision, in order to support the "London Climate Change Declaration" by considering the need to address the impact of climate change on the ability of the management system to achieve its intended outcomes.
The IAF Technical Committee (TC) has published the changes as a formal decision to clarify their impact on accreditation bodies, certification bodies, and certified organizations. (https://iaf.nu/iaf_system/uploads/documents/Joint_ISO-IAF_Communique_re_Climate_Change_Amds_to_ISO_MSS_Feb_2024_Final.pdf)
In line with this decision and publication, the specifications of various ISO standards have been revised as follows. (https://www.iso.org/standard/88431.html)
- ISO 9001:2015/Amd 1:2024
- ISO 14001/Amd 1:2024
- ISO 45001 Amd 1:2024
- ISO 22000 Amd 1:2024
- ISO 50001 Amd 1:2024
- ISO IEC 27001 Amd 1:2024
The newly added items with the amendment are as follows:
- 4.1 The organization must determine whether climate change is a relevant issue.
- 4.2 NOTE: Relevant interested parties may have requirements related to climate change.
What Our Certified Organizations Should Do;
- Climate change should be determined as relevant or not along with other issues, and if relevant, it should be assessed under the risk assessment within the scope of the management system standards.
- When multiple management systems (e.g., Quality Management and Health and Safety Management) are in operation, if found relevant, climate change is to be evaluated under each applicable management system standard.
- Some climate change issues and risks may be of a general nature regardless of the scope of the applicable management system or sector (e.g., when related to regulatory compliance or operational conformity and corporate resilience), while others will be specifically indexed to the requirements of the management system standards relevant to specific industries and the characteristics of the organization (e.g., energy production, agriculture, and fisheries) (e.g., geographic location, nature of the supply chain, or labor dynamics).
Impact of the Amendment on Third-Party Audits and the Certification Process;
During the management system audits conducted by Kioscert, the issues related to climate change in relation to the organization and its context will be queried in accordance with the latest published text. Where it cannot be demonstrated that all relevant internal and external issues, including climate change, have been taken into account, an appropriate finding will be made.
Management system standards will undergo the ISO amendment process; however, given the following, there is no need to revise the standard information on the certificates:
- The publication year of each Management System standard will not change.
- There is no change in the scope of application of the Certified Management System.
- There is no significant impact on the effectiveness of the Certified Management System.
- The methods and actions that certified organizations will ultimately implement due to the new requirement will be similar to those they will apply if there is a future change in other contextual issues already addressed within the scope of the management system.
We present this for your information.