ISO 14000 environmental standards: implementing innovation in management and measures

This chapter discusses the history and current development challenges of ISO 14000, one of the largest and currently most high-profile international standards frameworks. Climate change is certainly among the most pressing international social and political issues. One of the major problems in obtaining consensus on how to control or reduce it centers on how industry can manage, measure and monitor progress in meeting national and international environmental targets. The ISO 14000 framework of environmental management standards is an ongoing global effort to facilitate this objective. The chapter shows that although the ISO 14000 framework is an innovation in itself in terms of environmental management, the constant challenge is to ensure that the goals of environmental mitigation though standards also support efforts to innovate more broadly in environmental technologies and practices throughout the industrial spectrum.