Sustainability in International Standards

2009-08-05

With market globalization revealing unfair labour practices, and the threat of global warming looming, many countries are considering ways they can include sustainable development into their policies in such a way as they remain economically viable. Now, one Canadian is helping sustainability find its place in international standards.

Michel Bourassa, the Director of Standards at SCC, is Chairman of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO)’s Technical Management Board’s task force on sustainable development.

He said he accepted the chair position with the ultimate goal of including the principles of sustainability in more international standards, and thus increasing the ease with which countries adhere to those principles.

“We hope to provide the international community with the tools it needs to achieve sustainable development goals,” he explained.

The concept of sustainability has been moving to the forefront of public awareness over the past few decades. ISO’s members saw that sustainability was becoming an area of concern, and built a strong focus of sustainability into the 2005-2010 ISO Strategy, giving the document the theme, “Standards for a sustainable world.”

During this time, it became obvious to the members of ISO's Technical Management Board that there was more and more interest at the committee level. The board encouraged participants to continue their contributions to sustainability by developing standards that contribute in a systematic fashion to the overall effort.

But its members also felt more needed to be done, that these committees needed a started point from which to work. In the summer of 2007, it formed the task force to look at how existing standards could support the principle of sustainability, and how that support could be improved in the development of new standards.

Bourassa says the task force first needed to look at what work on sustainability was happening at the technical level. To do this, the task force sent out a questionnaire to the hundreds of technical committees working on developing standards for ISO, asking members whether existing standards, and those in development, addressed some part of sustainability.

“The responses were exceptional,” Bourassa says. We received anticipated results, as well as some unexpected, but very insightful approaches. We found that the inventory of standards with both direct and indirect impacts on one or more of the three legs of sustainability – economic, social, and environmental – was incredible.”

Bourassa says the Sustainability Task Force actually found there were entire areas of standards work that included multiple standards – all of which contribute to sustainable development in some form or another.

“One example is the area of building construction,” Bourassa explains. “A number of ISO technical committees are working on standards that fit under that category. The most obvious examples of this are ISO/TC 59 SC 17 Sustainability in building construction and ISO TC 205 Building environment design, but the category includes other technical committees, such as ISO/TC 163, Thermal performance and energy use in the built environment, and ISO/TC 71 Concrete.”

He points out that all of these technical committees have a collection of standards that support either the environmental, social or financial pillars of sustainability, or a combination of the three. He said the same can be said about standards relating to the environment, management systems and food supply chains, as well as numerous other categories.

In addition to determining how ISO was already incorporating sustainability into standards, the task force also developed a list of general principles that it recommends technical committees follow when factoring sustainability into a standard they’re developing. They include the stipulations that standards must remain within the context of the committee’s scope; that committees should notify the TMB of the title and scope of a proposed standard as soon as possible; and that committees undertaking such work should clarify their intentions in the introduction of the specific proposed standard or standards.

He said the task force also recommends that technical committees should note that the most widely recognized and used definition of sustainable development is that contained in the United Nations' Brundtland Commission’s groundbreaking report, "Our Common Future," published in 1987. The report defines sustainability as "meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."

ISO published the results of the Task Force on Sustainability’s deliberations in the brochure “How ISO’s technical programme and standards contribute to a sustainable world,” in October 2008.

Bourassa said he’s thrilled with the results so far of task force’s work, and adds there’s still much work to be done. He said the task force is now exploring how to encourage technical committees to consider the aspects of sustainability when developing any ISO standard, and look at how those standards will enrich the cohesiveness of the ISO library.

But in the meantime, he said, “I am proud of how the ISO TMB has managed to raise awareness about standards’ contribution to sustainability within ISO’s ranks. We can now be better assured that ISO standards are uniquely useful tools in the promotion and progression of the sustainable development movement.”

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