Smell the roses on World Environment Day

“Time for Nature” is the theme for this year’s World Environment Day, highlighting that the time has come to take action to save our planet.

From extreme weather events to COVID-19, worldwide phenomena are telling us that nature needs our attention. As this year’s World Environment Day theme reminds us, life on earth wouldn’t be possible without nature’s services, so we must all take action now to protect it and at least slow down the rate at which we are destroying it.

There are thousands of standards that help organizations of all kinds improve their environmental performance and take steps to make our world more sustainable. These include ISO 14001 for environmental management and others in the ISO 14000 series, such as the ISO 14055-1 guidelines for good practices in land management, which aims to prevent or minimize land degradation and desertification.

What’s more, ISO has just announced the creation of a brand-new technical committee charged with developing standards in the field of biodiversity, to help all kinds of organizations enhance their contribution to sustainable development and put nature first.

The committee intends to develop standards that harmonize terminologies and principles related to biodiversity, outline methodologies for impact analysis and help organizations define strategic actions and monitor their progress in these areas.

These future standards will help organizations integrate biodiversity considerations into their activities, assist them with related decision making and provide guidelines on specific biodiversity issues such as ecological engineering and aspects related to specific species and new technologies.