What happened to climate change?

As you probably remember, in 2024, ISO published a much-discussed amendment that applied to all its management system standards such as ISO 9001, ISO 14001, ISO 45001, ISO/IEC 27001, ISO 22000, ISO 37001, ISO 50001 or ISO/IEC 20000-1. 

Organizations implementing management systems were required to determine whether climate change was a relevant issue for their context, and they were also expected to consider whether their interested parties had requirements related to climate change.

This was quite unusual.

The amendment was applied to all management system standards, some of which addressed disciplines that had little to do with the climate and climate change. Anti-bribery for example or IT service management. 

And it was rolled out with significant emphasis. Certification bodies updated their audit checklists. Training providers added climate-change modules to their courses. Consultants advised clients on how to "address climate change" in their management systems. The implicit message was that this was an important strategic shift, not only a minor adjustment.

Here comes 2026 and the new edition of ISO 14001

ISO 14001, the environmental management standard, the one where climate change should arguably have the strongest natural home — was updated in April 2026. 

To the surprise of many, within ISO 14001:2026, climate change appears as one element in an enumeration. It is mentioned alongside other environmental conditions like pollution levels, the availability of natural resources, biodiversity or ecosystem health. There is no dedicated clause, no expanded treatment, no elevated framing. It just sits there in a list.

This is significant precisely because ISO 14001 is the environmental management standard. If any standard was going to give climate change a prominent treatment, it would have been this one. Instead, the 2026 revision absorbs climate change into the broader category of environmental conditions and moves on.

So, we went from a 2024 amendment that swept climate change into every management system standard with considerable fanfare, to a 2026 environmental management standard that treats climate change as just another item in a list of environmental considerations.

What changed?

There are a few possible explanations.

One is that the 2024 amendment was a reaction to a moment. International climate policy in 2023 and early 2024 was high on the global agenda, and standards bodies, like other institutions, respond to the priorities of their stakeholders. By 2025 and 2026, the political weather had shifted. New administrations took different positions on climate policy. ISO does not work in a vacuum, and the appetite for emphasizing climate change in standards may have cooled.

A second explanation is more technical. The 2024 amendment was, in practice, very thin. It added one short sentence to clause 4.1 and a note to clause 4.2. There was little to audit. Organizations would say "yes, we have considered climate change," produce a short paragraph in their context analysis, and that was the end of it. There was no meaningful follow-through into objectives, operational planning or performance evaluation. This produced very little operational change. So, ISO may have concluded that the topic did not deserve the prominence it had been given.

A third explanation, which sits between the first two, is that ISO realized the 2024 amendment had created an awkward situation. By applying the same climate-change requirements to ISO/IEC 27001 (information security), ISO 37001 (anti-bribery) and ISO/IEC 20000-1 (IT service management) as to ISO 14001 (environmental management), the amendment had blurred the boundary between disciplines. The argument that "climate change can affect any organization in some way" is true but not very useful in a discipline-specific standard. The 2026 revision of ISO 14001 appears to pull back from this universalism, treating climate change as one environmental condition among several rather than as a strategic theme requiring its own emphasis.

So, what really happened?

Honestly? Not much.

The 2024 amendment looked like a major step at the time. Climate change was suddenly in every management system standard, regardless of discipline. There were audits to update, training to redesign, clients to advise. For a moment it felt like the standards community was taking a position.

Two years later, with ISO 14001:2026 published, the verdict is in. The whole exercise produced very little. The amendment was thin to begin with, and the first major revision to follow it has quietly absorbed climate change back into the general category of environmental conditions. The standard that should have been the strongest advocate for the topic has effectively closed the chapter.

What this episode really shows is that the 2024 amendment was very likely a political move. It tracked a moment when climate policy was high on the international agenda and when institutions wanted to be seen as aligned with that agenda. When the policy environment shifted — new administrations, new priorities, less pressure on corporate climate disclosure — the standards adjusted accordingly. The technical justifications were always there in the background, but the timing and the breadth of the amendment make it hard to read as anything other than a response to political weather.

None of this means climate change has gone away. The climate continues to change. It continues to affect supply chains, infrastructure, agriculture, insurance markets, public health and the conditions in which businesses operate. The risks the 2024 amendment was nominally trying to address are still there, and they are not going to be addressed by deleting two sentences from a clause in a management system standard. They are also not going to be addressed by adding those two sentences.

The honest lesson from this whole episode is probably that standards and politics should be kept further apart than they were in 2024. ISO standards work best when they codify practices that organizations and auditors actually find useful — things that improve quality, security, safety or performance. They work poorly when they are used as instruments of a political moment, because political moments pass, and the standards are left looking either out of step or quietly walking themselves back.

For the next time a major societal issue tempts the standards community to make a sweeping cross-disciplinary intervention, this experience offers a useful caution. If the issue is real, organizations and regulators will already be addressing it, and the relevant standards can incorporate it in a focused, discipline-appropriate way. If the issue is mostly political, the intervention will not survive the next political cycle. 

Climate change is real but the political treatment of it is not. The standards community would do well to remember the difference next time