QMS & EMS London

The International Standards Organisation (ISO) and the Greenhouse Gas Management Institute (GHGMI) held a panel discussion on the sidelines of the UNFCCC talks in Paris. Tom Bauman, co-founder of the GHGMI and chair of a technical committee working on climate change mitigation and adaptation standards at the ISO, said that it had received a large number of requests over the past 18 months for new climate change standards.  Nick Blyth, policy and practice lead at IEMA, said that the demand for new standards was driven partly by a general increase in awareness of the impacts of climate change as well as the publication of the revised ISO 14001 environmental management standard. The revised 14001: 2015 standard requires organisations to consider the impact of the environment, including climate change, on their operations as well as their impact on the environment. “The revised ISO 14001 should introduce more people to climate change, which will then lead them into the...

The number of laws and policies to limit climate change has nearly doubled since the Copenhagen climate talks in 2009, according to new research. The findings came in a study from the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment . It covers 98 countries and the 28 member states of the EU, which together are responsible for 93% of global emissions.  At the end of 2014, these countries had implemented a total 804 climate laws and policies, up from 426 in 2009. In 1997, when the Kyoto protocol was agreed, these countries had just 54 climate laws and policies between them, the researchers said.

New figures from the office for national statistics (ONS) show that environment-related taxes have increased over the past two decades, peaking at £43 billion in 2013. According to environmental accounts published by the ONS, revenue from environmentally related taxes in 2013 represented 7.5% of total revenue from taxes and social contributions in the UK, which is equivalent to 2.7% of gross domestic product (GDP). Environment-related taxes include levies on petrol and diesel, motor vehicle duties paid by businesses and households, air passenger duty and landfill tax.

Global warming can still be limited to 2°C in 2100, but only if action is taken now to cut energy use and decarbonise electricity, say scientists. In the third part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) fifth assessment report, scientists argue that it remains possible and cost-effective to reduce global emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) to levels that are likely to limit temperature rise to 2°C at the end of the century.