Survey of the main changes to the ISO 14001 environmental certification, version 2015

Abstract

Within the scope of corporate management, the ISO 14001 Certification can be considered the gold standard for marking Environmental Management Systems and, in order to maintain it updated and relevant, a new version of this certification was launched in 2015. In general, the main changes in ISO 14001 are related to company organization, life cycle perspective, risks management, leadership and improvement of environmental performance. In this context, we performed a systematic literature review on the main changes and developments of the ISO 14001 environmental certification update, launched in 2015. Firstly, a broad search for publications addressing the topic was carried out, in which 265 articles were identified in scientific journals. Then, filters of adherence to the theme of the systematic review were applied so that of the 265 articles that composed the initial database, 85 went through the first filter, 46 through the second filter and 20 articles through the third filter in order to constitute the core for the comparative analysis. Through the comparative analysis of the twenty selected articles, we verified that the main changes include high-level structure, organization context, commitment and leadership, environmental policy, life cycle perspective, communication, environmental performance improvement.