About
ISO, the International Organization for Standardization, is the world’s largest developer and publisher of International Standards. It is a network of the national standards institutes of 167 countries, one member per country. There is a Central Secretariat in Geneva, Switzerland, that coordinates the system. (Taken from www.iso.org/iso/about.htm)
The ISO 14001 Environmental Management System Standard is a generic standard applicable for use in all industry sectors and applications.
It provides a solid management system for meeting goals and then improving on them. Implementing ISO 14001 across a company standardizes corporate policy, strategic decision making, communications, employee training, monitoring, environmental reporting, auditing procedures, and other important elements of managing environmental performance.
The forestry-specific standards (CSA, FSC, SFI) can then be built on top of this foundation of continual improvement.
The majority of forest certifications in Canada, to the CSA and SFI standards in particular, have been carried out where there is already an environmental management system based on the ISO 14001 standard in place. Therefore ISO 14001 is no longer reported on separately.