ISO 14001: A Missed Opportunity for Sustainable Global Industrial Development

ISO 14001 is the new industrial standard for environmental management systems, recently introduced and being adopted by businesses worldwide.
The authors present a fundamental critique of ISO 14001, showing how much it might have achieved and how little it is likely to deliver, and explaining how the process of establishing it restricted its effectiveness. They argue that ISO 14001 does little or nothing to measure or improve environmental performance, and that its effect may even be to undermine the limited progress to date in agreeing international standards of environmental impacts and performance