ISO 14001 Clause 4.2 requires an organization to identify who their interested parties are and to assess their needs and expectations for inclusion into the environmental management system.
The needs of these interested parties should be considered within the environmental management system since their expectations and conditions may impose varying obligations on your business.
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Interested parties are individuals or groups of people (stakeholders) who are interested in the environmental performance and operations of your business.
As such, you will need to determine which of their needs and expectations will become a compliance obligation.
Ensure that your organization has properly identified its interested parties, and subsequently determined if any of their needs and expectations to be adopted as a compliance obligation.
Interested parties may change throughout the business’s lifespan; that is why the environmental management system needs to be reviewed and revised regularly (improved).
Examples of interested parties include: customers, communities, contractors, suppliers, regulators, NGOs, and business partners, etc.
Interested parties can have an impact on your company, so careful consideration of their requirements is necessary.
Although not specifically required, objective evidence should ideally comprise a list, or a matrix of interested parties, their corresponding needs and expectations, and an indication of which of these has been accepted as a compliance obligation.
| Interested Party | Environmental Needs | Environmental Expectations | Related Compliance Obligations |
| Environmental Protection Agency | Compliance with regulations and input to consultations | Accurate and timely reporting | Licence/permit compliance and reporting Compliance with emission limits |
| Suppliers and Contractors | Clear specifications on what is expected of them relating to the environment | Consideration of supplier’s constraints and ability to support with environmental improvement | Product specification stating environmental requirements Provide environmental criteria when selecting suppliers, vendors or vetting contractors |
| Community and Neighbours | No excess noise, emissions, or odour | Providing a dedicated telephone line or email account for enquiries or complaints | Regular reporting of monitoring data |
In order to determine the relevancy of an interested party or their needs and expectations, your organization needs to answer: ‘Will this interested party (or their requirements) have an effect on the organization’s ability to achieve the intended outcomes of the environmental management system?’.
If the answer is ‘yes’, then their needs and expectations should be adopted as a requirement.
We suggest your rank the interested parties requirements according to their degree of Priority and their Relevance (e.g. 1 low, 5 high) to current objectives, policies and conformity of products and services as relevant to your EMS.
Communicating with stakeholders and interested parties, particularly in relation to compliance obligations is vital.
Communication with interested parties should be based on performance data generated by your organization’s EMS, which will require robust monitoring and measurement to ensure that the data is reliable.
You should ensure that the monitoring and measurement processes are included in the internal audit programme so your organization can assure itself that the checking processes and validated and that the data it is communicating is accurate.
All of the ISO 14001 clauses are fully-documented and explained in our Environmental Management System Template (EMS).
We have procedures, templates, checklists, process maps, forms and gap analysis tools to help your documentation without missing a single input or output.
Before you invest all the hours reinventing the wheel, before you spend countless dollars outsourcing the task — try our templates.
Updated: 26th February 2022
Author: Richard Keen
Richard is our Compliance Director, responsible for content & product development.
But most importantly he is ISO's biggest fanboy and a true evangelist of the standards.
Learn more about Richard
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