In 2024, ISO mandated that all management system standards be amended to add language related to climate change. This was not prompted by any actual changes in the professions covered by the standards themselves, which include cybersecurity, quality management, and occupational health and safety, but by the personal decision by ISO Secretary-General Sergio Mujica, who was trying to ingratiate himself to the United Nations in an (apparently failed) bid to be elected as UN Secretary-General in 2026.<\/p>\n
Under Mujica, ISO has rebranded as the enforcement arm for the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), using its might as an international publishing house to force entire economies to comply with the goals regardless of what position each nation’s government may have about them.<\/p>\n
Of the 17 SDGs, Mujica chose “climate action<\/em>” as the centerpiece for his campaign, and ordered it be added to all management system standards whether the concept was on-topic for the subject matter or not. As a result, the language now appears in standards that have little or nothing to do with climate change, leaving entire industries confused.<\/p>\n The change created a conflict within the actual pages of the affected standards. Each of the standards included existing language that specifically honed in references to requirements as being limited to those applicable to the subject matter of the given standard. For ISO 9001, the quality management system standard, clause 4.1 reads as follows (emphasis added):<\/p>\n The organization shall determine external and internal issues that are relevant to its purpose and its strategic direction and that affect its ability to achieve the intended results of its quality management<\/strong><\/em> system.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The intent by the authors of ISO 9001 was to specifically ensure that users did not overwhelm themselves by considering “issues<\/em>” that were outside<\/strong> <\/em>of the scope of quality management. This was both a practical and profitable decision. On the practical side, it made no sense to use a quality management system to manage environmental issues. On the profit side, ISO did not want ISO 9001 to compete with it environmental standard, ISO 14001.<\/p>\n Mujica cared little for any of it, obsessed with is own career advancement. As a result, after the 2024 Mujica amendment, the standard is left as follows:<\/p>\n The organization shall determine external and internal issues that are relevant to its purpose and its strategic direction and that affect its ability to achieve the intended results of its quality management system.<\/p>\n The organization shall determine whether climate change is a relevant issue.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Noe, the second sentence now contradicts the first.<\/p>\n ISO 9001 clause 4.2 highlights the contradiction even more. With the Mujica amendment in place, the standard now reads:<\/p>\n …. the organization shall determine … the requirements of these interested parties that are relevant to the quality management<\/strong> <\/em>system.<\/p>\n NOTE Relevant interested parties can have requirements related to climate change.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Again, whereas the original text tried to put up guardrails to prevent environmental and other issues from creeping into the scope of a QMS, Mujica smashed those guardrails entirely.<\/p>\n No note or guidance was given to resolve this conflict, except for some fairly outlandish fearmongering by ISO that climate change could cripple one’s supply chain, and thus affect quality. If you rely on lumber, and all the forests burn, you won’t be able to make products, they say. The problem here is that this relies on a hypothetical scenario that Mujica and his followers shoved and pushed to make it appear to be on-topic after the fact.<\/p>\n If we are trading in hypotheticals, then all<\/strong><\/em> of the UN SDGs could affect quality. The UN wants universal healthcare; sick employees without doctors cannot make product, so does that now bring it into scope of a QMS? The UN wants universal living wages; underpaid employees could have less enthusiasm and make bad product, so is payroll now a QMS issue?<\/p>\n You can see how this plays out.<\/p>\n But only climate change<\/strong><\/em> was selected. Why? Why not the other 16 SDGs?<\/p>\n ISO has no answer.<\/p>\n The contradiction has real-world implications for users of all ISO management system standards. They must now calculate a way to address climate change within their system no matter what the subject matter entails Users of ISO 27001, the cybersecurity standard, must now come up with a way to placate auditors on climate change, despite there being little relevance between cybersecurity and the environment. Should companies abandon specific cybersecurity controls because they utilize electricity-hogging servers or data farms? What do they put in their place? Abacuses?<\/p>\n Nor does ISO eat its own dog food. ISO has made no attempt to rein in its reliance on physical meetings in far-flung tourist destinations for committee meetings, plenaries, press junkets, or other events. Without those, ISO would never get any volunteers to participate — Sam Somerville desperately needs to get a tan somehow — so its business model is reliant on the burning of fossil fuels by jets in order to hold hundreds of meetings around the world each year. Keep in mind, the main product of ISO is a set of PDF documents<\/strong> <\/em>that could be created, published, and sold entirely without any physical touch at all.<\/p>\n Worse still, IOSO has gone all-in on AI, one of the largest impact factors on climate change. Not only is ISO trying to adopt AI in its own operations and standards-making, it endorses the use of AI for its customers. AI servers are on track to cause far more harm to the environment than even those jets that Mujica likes flying in.<\/p>\n ISO standards are no longer built on best practices proven in the world, subject to peer review, and established on the basis of sound management theory. Instead, any whim that strikes Mujica’s fancy suddenly becomes world law, and there is little any government can do about it so long as they continue to demand ISO standards be followed.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Now, sentences in ISO standards contradict each other.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":33982,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","mc4wp_mailchimp_campaign":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[8198,43,39,14,627],"class_list":["post-33979","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion","tag-climate-change","tag-iso","tag-iso-14001","tag-iso-9001","tag-sergio-mujica","et-has-post-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oxebridge.com\/emma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33979","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oxebridge.com\/emma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oxebridge.com\/emma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oxebridge.com\/emma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oxebridge.com\/emma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33979"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.oxebridge.com\/emma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33979\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33983,"href":"https:\/\/www.oxebridge.com\/emma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33979\/revisions\/33983"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oxebridge.com\/emma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33982"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oxebridge.com\/emma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oxebridge.com\/emma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oxebridge.com\/emma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}