Back in the day, when I was tasked with the job of ensuring my work colleagues were fully compliant with all the relevant corporate standards, my life was defined by a constant, soul-destroying battle to persuade others to treat attention to detail as seriously as I did. Often enough, this resulted in aggreived accusations of pedantry, but sometimes the detail really did matter. Take, for example, the time I discovered that my boss had deemed it acceptable that the corridor leading to the fire escape should be blocked by forty homeless boxes of highly flammable archived documentation. With my health and safety hat on, I was quick to recognise the risk that this small detail represented. So, understandably, I was keen to ensure that it featured in the latest office health and safety risk assessment submitted to my supreme leader. However, upon being handed the report, he seemed less than impressed. “Thank you very much,” he replied in a tone rinsed of all sincerity, “because, now you’ve committed that to print, I have to do something about it!” Success at last, I thought – but only until I discovered that it is in fact much easier for a managing director to remove his health and safety manager than it is to remove forty boxes of archived documentation.

I didn’t tell you this in order to gain your sympathy (although if it were offered, I wouldn’t complain). I did it instead to make an important point before going on to describe how climate change concerns have gripped the world of corporate standards. The problem is that such standards, and the sensibilities that lie behind them, achieve at best a tenuous influence over the thoughts and actions of your average, self-made captain of industry. But that still won’t stop the bureaucratic juggernaut.

Take, for example, ISO 14001, the ‘gold standard’ for corporate environmental management systems. It wasn’t my boss’s sudden appetite for sustainability and a corporate concern for the environment that led to my company’s attainment of ISO 14001 certification. It was instead my own realisation that our main customer, the UK government, had plans to introduce a requirement that any supplier or private sector subcontractor wishing to bid for future government work should hold such certification. Alpha gorilla didn’t have to spare one precious moment of his time to address that problem, because yours truly could be relied upon to recognise it and deal with it, leaving him to address more important problems, such as how to get around the ISO 14001 environmental management system once it had been established. And these things have a way of flowing downwards. The government insisted that our own subcontracting arrangements should include the same contractual requirements, and so the misery of setting up corporate governance paraphernalia that no one really wants could be passed on all the way down to the bottom of the supply chain.

Be that as it may, I have noticed of late that life has been getting even harder for your average, feckless executive whose preference is to leave the small detail of addressing the government’s demands for environmental management and climate change mitigation to the minions. And it is all because of the activities of a reasonably obscure bureaucrat from Rotherham.

The other day I got to wondering who was the world’s most famous Nigel Croft (yes, retirement really has left me with an awful lot of time on my hands). And so, I looked it up and found that Nigel Howard Croft is a former chairman of the ISO Joint Technical Coordination Group for Management System Standards. During his tenure, he oversaw the deployment of the ISO London Declaration on Climate Action. In particular, Nigel was instrumental in the introduction of ISO Guide 84:2020, a guide written for the benefit of those who are tasked with writing ISO standards. It turns out that people who write such standards have to meet certain expectations, and these include ensuring that climate change is appropriately considered. In the words of the London Declaration:

ISO Guide 84 helps standards developers integrate climate considerations at every stage—planning, drafting, and updating. It provides tools for assessing climate impacts, ensuring standards reduce emissions and enhance resilience. By promoting resource efficiency, low-carbon solutions, and long-term climate adaptation, Guide 84 supports the development of standards that drive sustainable, climate-resilient growth.

Let me just leave you for a moment to let that sink in.

Okay, time’s up. What it means is that not just the environmental standards but every ISO standard becomes a potential mechanism for forcing organisations to sign up to the climate change action behemoth. In the words of Guide 84:

This document is intended for developers of ISO standards and other deliverables to encourage the inclusion of provisions in standards to address climate change impacts, risks and opportunities, and aims to:

— enable standards committees to determine if the standard under consideration should take into account aspects, issues, impacts, risks and/or opportunities associated with climate change;

— provide standards developers with a systematic approach to address climate change impacts, risks and opportunities in a coherent and consistent manner, with regard to both new and revised standards, and in a manner related to the objective and scope of the standard being developed;

— promote consistency and compatibility to the extent practical among standards that directly or indirectly address climate change and their wider uptake in support of sustainability.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that all ISO standards absolutely must include a clause aimed at addressing climate change, but it does mean that the writers of these standards should think seriously about it. Furthermore, as you have just read, this guidance was intended to apply not only to standards yet to be written but also those that already existed.

I decided to put this to the test by looking up an old friend of mine: ISO 9001. In my day, this was just about quality management and had nothing to do with climate change. But this is what a 2024 amendment had to say:

Clause 4.1

Add the following sentence at the end of the subclause:

The organization shall determine whether climate change is a relevant issue.

Clause 4.2

Add the following note at the end of the subclause:

NOTE Relevant interested parties can have requirements related to climate change.

So not only has ISO 9001 now responded to Guide 84’s insistence that it should take up the cause for climate action, it has done so by passing on that imperative to certificate holders.

ISO 9001 certification is pretty ubiquitous, so there can’t be that many organisations missing out on the fun. But ISO 9001 is also quite generic, and it is indeed true that relevant interested parties can have quality requirements related to climate change. But what about other ISO standards? For example, cyber security is rather a niche subject. Surely, ISO 27001 – the standard for Information Security Management Systems – can’t possibly have a requirement covering climate change, can it?

Wrong! Once again, ISO 27001 has its own 2024 amendment requiring the addition of exactly the same clauses. And what about health and safety? The relevant standard is ISO 45001 – and guess what. I could go on.

So, ISO Guide 84:2020 really does seem to be achieving the desired result. I’m sure that Nigel is a really good bloke and a true professional. It’s just that he was also the bureaucrat’s bureaucrat; which, unfortunately, means that when he caught the climate change bug, he became a superspreader.

I’m reminded how the UK’s Education and Training Foundation (ETF) ‘refreshed’ the overarching professional standards for the further education sector, requiring educators to model sustainable practices and promote sustainable development principles relevant to their subject specialism. And believe me, they do expect every subject specialism to be the perfect opportunity to promote sustainable development principles. Maths, Dentistry, History, Media Studies – pick any subject and you have ready access to resources that enable you to convert your specialism into the perfect platform for pushing the climate action agenda.

So, it seems to me that the urge to worry about the effects of climate change is now well and truly institutionalised, such that there can no longer be an area of specialism that can’t be co-opted for that purpose. It starts within the education system but continues into the workplace. And just to keep everyone on the same page, there are always standards and guidelines available to ensure that your concerns abide by the authorized narrative.

I’m just so glad I’m now far too old to have to deal with any of this first hand. I’m happily retired, and there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t wake up to the exquisite pleasure of knowing I don’t have to go to work and that my day can be filled instead with nothing more than idle curiosity and the search for other influential Nigels.