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A Publication of the Emissions Marketing Association
Serving the International Emissions Trading Community
VOLUME 4, ISSUE 2, FEBRUARY 2000
ISO 14000 Standards as Option for Mitigation Projects and Emission Reduction Projects
 By B. Tod Delaney

The Kyoto Protocol requires in Article 13(4)(i) to "seek and utilize where appropriate the services and cooperation of, and information provided by competent international organizations and intergovernmental and nongovernmental bodies." Last year, preliminary discussions between the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and UNFCCC officials began after an inquiry from the UNFCCC to Technical Committee 207 requesting how ISO 14000, the voluntary set of international standards for environmental management, might be applied to the issue of global climate change. ISO standards, which have been approved by more than 130 countries through ISO, already provide existing internationally recognized standards for environmental management systems, environmental auditing, environ-mental performance indicators and product life cycle assessment.

The standards can be applied to climate change mitigation projects and used as the basis for the operation of the flexibility mechanisms. The UNFCCC secretariat is extremely interested in ISO's structure and success, and as a result, the UNFCCC identified ISO as a potential ally, hoping not to "reinvent the wheel" and use existing standards and frameworks as a basis for its future work. The following ISO Standards might be useful in the emissions trading discussion:

ISO 14001 -- Environmental Management Systems (EMS)

An environmental management system (EMS), modeled after ISO 14001, provides a management framework for identifying key environmental aspects of an organization, the establishment of targets to manage these aspects, and monitoring and measurement of the framework to track progress. Some organizations have already started to address their green-house gas emissions as one of their significant environmental aspects.

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