On 22 February 2024, the International Accreditation Forum (IAF) and the International Standards Organization (ISO), in support of the "London Declaration on Climate Change", assessing the need to consider the impact of Climate Change on the ability of the management system to achieve its intended outcomes, decided to add two new textual statements to a number of existing management system standards and to include them in all new standards under development/revision.

The IAF Technical Committee (TC) published the amendments as a formal decision to clarify the impact of the Amendments on accreditation bodies, certification bodies and certified bodies.

In line with this decision and publication, the specifications of various ISO standards have been amended as follows.

• ISO 9001:2015 / Amd 1:2024               https://www.iso.org/standard/88431.html

• ISO 14001:2015 / Amd 1:2024             https://www.iso.org/standard/88209.html 

• ISO 22000:2018 / Amd 1:2024             https://www.iso.org/standard/88410.html 

• ISO 22301:2019 / Amd 1:2024             https://www.iso.org/standard/88412.html 

• ISO/IEC 27001:2022 / Amd 1:2024     https://www.iso.org/standard/88435.html 

• ISO 37001:2016 / Amd 1:2024            https://www.iso.org/standard/88419.html 

• ISO 45001:2018 / Amd 1:2024             https://www.iso.org/standard/88428.html 

4.1. The organization should determine whether climate change is a relevant issue.

4.2. Note: Interested parties may have requirements related to climate change.

What our certified organizations should do in this scope;

• It should be determined whether Climate Change is relevant together with other issues, and if relevant, it should be evaluated within the scope of risk assessment within the scope of management systems standards.

• In cases where more than one management system (e.g. Quality Management and Health and Safety Management) is operated, Climate Change is assessed within the scope of each management system standard if it is determined to be relevant.

• ­It is noted that some climate change considerations and risks may be of a generic nature regardless of the scope of the applicable management system or sector (e.g. where they relate to regulatory compliance or operational compliance and organizational resilience), while others will be specifically indexed to the requirements of management system standards for specific industries and characteristics of the organization (e.g. power generation, agriculture and fisheries) (e.g. geographical location, nature of the supply chain or labour dynamics).

Impact of the amendment on 3rd party audits and certification process;

• Management systems audits carried out by KingCert will question the issues affecting Climate Change relevant to the organization and its context, in accordance with the latest published text. Where the organization cannot demonstrate that all internal and external issues identified as relevant, including Climate Change, have been considered, an appropriate finding will be made. 

• Management system standards will go through the ISO amendment process but there is no need to issue a revised certificate given that.

• 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 the methods and actions they will implement in the event of future changes in other contextual issues they currently address within the scope of the Management system.

All audits performed (initial, surveillance and re-certification) after 01.05.2024 will be carried out taking into account these changes.