Monthly Archives: February 2014

ISO 45001 Update – Annex A Clause 6 Planning

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The US Technical Advisory Group (US TAG) for the new Occupational Health and Safety Management System Standard ISO 45001 met in Washington DC in late January which we attended as voting members.  The objective of the meeting was to review the first working draft of the new standard and provide comments on the US position.  The area of greatest interest was Clause 6 Planning where discussion centered on how best to address the concept of hazard identification, risk assessment and risk treatment (control).  A key question discussed was how much discipline specific information should be inserted into the High Level Structure (HLS), the normative part of the standard, and how much should be presented in the Annex (the informative part of the standard).

My opinion is that the requirements part of the HLS should be left mostly as it is with only little additional discipline specific (OH&S) information being added.  Additional discipline specific information should be placed in the Annex as informative interpretation and guidance on how to use the standard.

As the DC meeting concluded several members of the group offered to prepare the Annex portion of the standard to be presented in Morocco next month at the international meeting of the full ISO 45001 Project Committee.

ECSI prepared a proposed Annex A section for the standard which was based partially on other international and national standards like ISO 31000:2009 – Risk Management, ISO 31010:2009 Risk Assessment, OHSAS 18001:2007 and ANSI Z10:2012.

Here is one of the figures we introduces to explain the relationship between the various parts of ISO 45001 and the risk assessment process.

Risk Assessment Parts 8x8

The Annex we prepared explained the different steps in the risk assessment process and also included a figure that could be used to explain the concept of Risk Analysis (Figure A6-2).  The information we provided was combined with information offered by others on the US TAG.  The proposed annex will be presented by the US TAG next month in Morocco. Now we just need to sit back and see what the rest of the international ISO 45001 Project Committee thinks about the US proposal for Annex A clause 6. .

Risk Assessment Matrix

ISO 14001 Continual Improvement Survey 2013 Results

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ISO recently published the results of a survey questionnaire circulated last year to the international community .  The purpose of the survey was to help guide the ISO technical committee (TC 207) revision of ISO 14001 scheduled to be released next year.  The survey reached over 5000 organizations or individuals in 110 countries worldwide.  57% of the respondents were in Europe with only 17% responding from North America.  54% of those responding were actual users of the standard such as industries and 45% were either consultants, certification bodies performing audits or other types of organizations.

The survey asked questions about the perceived value of ISO 14001 to Environmental Management and Business Management.  The areas where ISO 14001 was thought to be most valuable were:

  • Ability to meet legal requirements
  • Environmental performance improvement

The areas where ISO 14001 was thought to be of least value were:

  • Providing financial benefit
  • Improvement in supplier environmental performance

The overall average percent of very high to high value responses was 54% with only an average of 15% recording a perceived low or no value for all areas.  This suggests that participants have a generally positive opinion of the value of ISO 14001.

Value of ISO 14001

One  of the puzzling results of the survey was over 75% of respondents rated  ISO 14001 very high or high in its value  for environmental performance improvement but only about 25% believe that the standard provides a significant financial benefit.  Apparently survey respondents do not believe that investing in ISO 14001 as a way to reduce waste and resource use will provide an acceptable  return on investment.

Another surprising result is that almost 70% of respondents rated meeting stakeholder requirements as very high or high but only 27% believe that ISO 14001 has very high or high value when it comes to improving supplier environmental performance.  It’s difficult to tell from the data what survey respondents were thinking when they read “stakeholders”, but in my opinion there is a good chance they were thinking about their customers that require them to have an ISO 14001 EMS.  If 70% believe ISO 14001 improves performance and 60% implemented ISO 14001 to satisfy a customer requirement why are they not making the connection that the purpose of them being required to have an ISO 14001 is a result of their customers’ efforts to influence the environmental performance of their suppliers?

Thanks to Dr. Lisa Greenwood, Lecturer in Environmental Sustainability, Health and Safety at Rochester Institute of Technology for leading the evaluation of the survey. Here are links to documents evaluating the survey responses:

ISO 14001 Survey 2013 – Final Report and Analysis

ISO 14001 Survey 2013  – Summary Report