ISO9001 and the Climate Change Actions Amendment

What's been amended?

The amendment adds only 2 lines to the ISO 9001 standard, one within Clause 4.1 — Understanding the organisation and its context and one in Clause 4.2 — Understanding the needs and expectations of interested parties. Both clauses are ones that unfortunately a lot of organisations gloss over, which is a shame as they really do set the foundation of your entire quality management system.  

Small Changes - Big Impacts

Clause 4.1 has had the following sentence added at the end of this subclause:

"The organisation shall determine whether climate change is a relevant issue."

ISO9001:2015 Amendment 1 Clause 4.1

What ISO is trying to get you to do here is genuinely consider the impacts that climate change has on your business. They are trying to help you ensure you are thinking strategically about your organisation. 

Think about things like:

Supply Chain

Raw Materials

Do climate changes have any impact on the availability or costs of your raw materials?  What about the quality of them? The delivery times?

Local Infrastructure

Your People

Will climate change impact your team directly? Do people have to start thinking about relocating? Working remotely, will you lose staff because of it? Will you find it harder to attract staff to your organisation due to climate change impacts?

If your people work outside, what are the impacts then? What if it's hotter for longer, higher UV, what if it's wetter, windier? What impact will that have on your people and your products?

What impact will climate change have on your organisational costs, ongoing rate increases from local councils to help manage those climate change impacts, raw materials even travel are things you need to think about considering.  

Climate Events

That 1 in 100 year storm that keeps everyone home and the business closed for a few days or longer seems to be happening a lot more often, what does that mean for you and insurances, operational stability.  

Your Buildings

If you are looking at new locations or buildings, then what are the impacts that you should consider that are driven by change sin climate? Are the building standards different?  

Your own impacts

You should also consider your own impact; how does your environmental impact affect your organisations' stability? Is your customer starting to request more environmental thinking from you as a company, what does that mean?  

Understanding the Climate Change needs and expectations of interested parties

Clause 4.2 has had the following note added at the end of this subclause:  

"Relevant interested parties can have requirements related to climate change"

ISO9001:2015 Amendment 1 Clause 4.2

Again, not a lot of words but an equally big impact. Business are need to be aware that when thinking about what other interested parties care about with respect to your organisation they may well have an expectation around actions for climate change, either in terms of how you protect your business or how you contribute to minimising the effect your organisation has on your climate impact.

This note is telling you that you need to factor these things into your considerations about the interested parties. What climate or environmental requirements do your investors have of you? What about your local council or government? Your customers? Your employees? Your neighbours? All these groups (and many more) make up your interested parties, and the standard is telling you that you need to consider any requirements that they have related to climate change.

Why is this in ISO9001 and not ISO14001

ISO14001 for Environmental Management Systems is all about managing your environmental impact (all of them, not just CO2!) It's about understanding your impact and working to reduce and eliminate.

ISO9001 is all about your Quality Management System, it's about how you run your business, how you make the business robust and sustainable for the long term. If you aren't considering climate change as part of your business system, then you are failing to managing one of the single greatest threats to your organisation. That's the definition of a poorly managed business.

The Wrap up

The ISO9001:2015 Climate Change Amendment is live and now part of the standards requirements. If you are heading for certification audits soon then expect this to be part of the audit. That means you need to do the work properly and you need to genuinely consider the impacts and the needs of the interested parties.