Determining significant environmental aspects
Determining significant environmental aspects
(ISO 14000)
Significance is a relative concept; it cannot be defined in absolute terms. What is significant for one organization may not be significant for another. Evaluating significance involves applying both technical analysis and judgment by the organization. The use of criteria should help an organization to establish which environmental aspects and associated impacts it considers significant. Establishing and applying such criteria should provide consistency and reproducibility in the assessment of significance.
When establishing criteria for significance, an organization should consider the following:
a) Environmental criteria (such as scale, severity and duration of the impact, or type, size and frequency of an environmental aspect);
b) Applicable legal requirements (such as emission and discharge limits in permits or regulations, etc.);
c) The concerns of internal and external interested parties (such as those related to organizational values, public image, noise, odor or visual degradation).
Significance criteria can be applied either to an organization’s environmental aspects or to their associated impacts. Environmental criteria can apply to both environmental aspects and environmental impacts, but in most situations they apply to environmental impacts.
When applying criteria, an organization can set levels (or values) of significance associated with each criterion, for example based on a combination of likelihood (probability/frequency) of an occurrence and its consequences (severity/intensity). Some type of scale or ranking can be helpful in assigning significance, for example quantitatively in terms of a numeric value, or qualitatively in terms of levels such as high, medium, low or negligible.
An organization may choose to evaluate the significance of an environmental aspect and associated impacts, and may find it useful to combine results from the criteria. It should decide which environmental aspects are significant, e.g. by using a threshold value.
To facilitate planning, an organization should maintain appropriate information on the environmental aspects identified and those considered significant.
The organization should use this information to understand the need for and to determine operational controls. Information on identified impacts should be included as appropriate. It should be reviewed and updated periodically, and when circumstances change to ensure it is up to date. For these purposes, it can be helpful to maintain them in a list, register, database or other form.
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on Wednesday, October 21st, 2009 at 3:27 am and is filed under ISO 14000 standard.
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