Winning The Environmental Challenge With ISO 14001:2015 by Ramesh C. Grover

Author:Ramesh C. Grover
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Notion Press
Published: 2017-09-15T16:00:00+00:00

So, you need to identify the risks and opportunities that are present for your EMS, decide what need to be addressed, and keep documentation of the risks and opportunities that you will address.

To understand the difference between External and Internal issues and their Risk and opportunity and the Environmental aspect analysis of our activities, products and services as per Cl. 6.1.2, take the example above. When the ore of high quality, being extracted from the mine gets depleted, you would need to use a low quality, environmentally harmful ore in its place in the future. You could also find an opportunity to replace the current Technology with one that is more environmentally safe to use. While these risks and opportunities are related to your environmental aspect, they were not identifiable by environmental aspect analysis of your activities, products and services.

So, there is a relationship between environmental aspects and risks and opportunities in the EMS, but this is not the only place to find risks and opportunities. Environmental aspects are not the only risks and opportunities that you will be able to identify for your EMS. Risks and opportunities can also arise from your Compliance Obligations (especially when they change), information from your customers or market research, benchmarking your processes against other companies for improvement, suggestions from employees, or feedback from neighbours or other external interested parties.

How you identify risks and opportunities is up to you, but it is an important activity within your EMS. Risks and opportunities can bring in great ideas that can be used for the continual improvement of your Environmental Management System.

There is no requirement for you to have a documented system for identifying your risks and opportunities, nor do you need to formally track what they are or how you will address them. The only requirement for documentation with respect to risks and opportunities is to “maintain documented information about the risks and opportunities that need to be addressed.”

After identifying the risks and opportunities that need to be addressed, you then also need to plan actions to address them as per Cl. 6.1.4. This can include using them in your decision of which environmental objectives to put in place, but you are not required to have an environmental objective for every risk or opportunity identified. When we identify significant impacts or Risk, they can be controlled by either making an Objective for Continual Improvement or by controlling the operation through an Operational Control Procedure.

It is not hard to see that identifying the risks and opportunities that are applicable to your business just makes sense when you have a management system and are trying to improve. It is only by managing your risks and taking action to gain the benefit of your opportunities that your business will be able to improve how it functions.

The ISO 14001:2015 stresses the need for increased strategic risk management to replace and improve the current system that relies more on a “reactive” preventive action process.

Another fundamental change is the increasing involvement of “top management” in this process.

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