## I. WORKING METHODOLOGY
### a) General Requirements
The organization must establish and maintain an environmental management system whose requirements are described as follows:
## i. Environmental Policy
Management at the highest level must define their organization's environmental policy.
## ii. Panning
Environmental Aspects:
The organization must maintain procedures for identifying the environmental aspects of the various activities
General Requirements and other:
The organization must maintain a procedure for identifying the legal and other requirements applied to the environmental aspects of the activities.
Objectives and Targets:
The organization must establish and maintain environmental objectives and targets.
Environmental Management Program:
To achieve these objectives, the organization must establish and maintain one or more programs.
### b) Implementation and Operation
## i. Structure and Responsibility
The environmental management system requirements are established, implemented and maintained in accordance with this international standard.
## ii. Training, Awareness and Competency
The staff should be made aware of:
- The importance of compliance with environmental policy and environmental management system requirements;
- With significant environmental impacts;
- Their roles and responsibilities to achieve compliance with environmental policy and requirements;
- Potential consequences of deviations from specified operating procedures.
## iii. Communication
The organization shall establish and maintain procedures for:
- Ensure internal communication between the different levels and functions of the organization;
- Receive, document and respond to relevant requests from external stakeholders.
## iv. Environmental Management System Documentation
The organization must establish and maintain paper or electronic information and maintain procedures to control all documents required by the standard:
### Operational Proficiency
The organization must identify those of its operations and activities that are associated with significant environmental aspects
Emergency Prevention and Responsiveness
The organization must identify potential accidents and emergency situations and be able to react to reduce the associated environmental impacts.
## v. Control and Corrective Action
Monitoring and Measurement
The organization must regularly monitor and measure activities that may have a significant environmental impact.
Non-compliance, corrective action and preventive action
The organization must define the responsibilities for the analysis of non-conformities, the taking of measures to reduce potential impacts, as well as to commit and carry out corrective and preventive and corrective actions.
Recordings
The organization must establish and maintain one or more programs and procedures for periodic audits of the environmental management system
## vi. Management Review
The organization's management must review the environmental management system to ensure that it is still appropriate, sufficient and effective, as well as any changes to elements of the environmental management system.
## II. PERFORM SELF-DIAGNOSIS
### a) Identification of the Most Significant Environmental Aspects and Impacts of the Various Activities:
Environmental aspect: An element of an organization's activities, products or services that may interact with the environment. An aspect is therefore synonymous with impact factor, the aspect is the source of impacts [10].
Environmental impact: Any change in the environment, negative or beneficial, resulting wholly or partially from the activities, products or services of an organization [11].
From the identified activities, products and services, it is still necessary to identify environmental aspects and the impacts associated with them: It is a question of breaking down the activity to identify any operation that may generate nuisances (processes, equipment that has been part of, raw materials, outgoing products, waste or waste generated, resources, fluids and energy used, maintenance and cleaning work of equipment applied to process equipment, etc.).
The decomposition can be done on different levels, from the most general to the most detailed (workshop, manufacturing process, particular equipment) depending on the need to access or not very precise information. For to be more exhaustive, we can, for each activity, study each environment/ area or each nuisance.
The identification of environmental aspects and impacts is made taking into account the situation of the mode of operation (Table 1): Normal (N) as the situation of transitional operation (T) or the Incident operation (I)
Table 1: Situations of Operating Modes
<table><tr><td>Note</td><td>Normal Operation(N)</td><td>Transitional March(T)</td><td>Incident Operation(I)</td></tr><tr><td>1</td><td>The event takes place continuously</td><td>The event takes place several times a day</td><td>The event takes place several times on the site</td></tr><tr><td>2</td><td>The event takes place at least 50% of the time</td><td>The event takes place at least once a week</td><td>The event has already happened once on the site</td></tr><tr><td>3</td><td>The event takes place between 25 and 50% of the time</td><td>The event takes place at least once a month</td><td>The event has already occurred on similar sites</td></tr><tr><td>4</td><td>Event takes place at least 25% of the time</td><td>The event takes place at least once a month</td><td>The event has no known history</td></tr></table>
The identification of environmental aspects and impacts allows us to see environmental indicators and propose approaches for each indicator that will help us better understand environmental problems, material flows, personal perception and other environmental data.
### b) Assessment of Environmental Aspects and Impacts
The process approach and the identification of Environmental Aspects and Impacts allows us to identify:
- Any operation which may generate nuisances (processes, equipment forming part of them, liquid, solid or gaseous discharges, etc.);
- Sensitive points;
- Type of action to be implemented;
- Skills and information required to master processes.
## i. Assessment of Significant Environmental Impacts
The assessment of environmental impacts is carried out by taking into account three factors (Table 2): «Gravity», «Frequency of occurrence» and «Sensitivity of the receiving environment» and it has 4 stages:
### 1. Intrinsic gravity assessment (G): This involves determining the severity of the environmental
impact. For this, it is important to define beforehand the criteria that will be taken into account in order to carry out this evaluation. Criteria such as: toxicity of products, amount of water or energy consumed... what helps to determine the order of magnitude of impacts, either critical, major, limited or minor;
2. Frequency of occurrence assessment (F): this involves determining the frequency of occurrence of the Environmental Impact;
3. The evaluation of the Sensitivity (S): the sensitivity of the receiving medium is also determined by characterizing the receiving medium (floor tightness for example);
Table 2: Environmental Impact Assessment
Table 3: Matrix of Environmental Impact Criticality
<table><tr><td>Score/Criterion</td><td>Gravity (G)</td><td>Frequency (F)</td><td>Sensitivity (S)</td></tr><tr><td>1</td><td>Irreversible damage to living beings (humans, fauna and flora) whether they are internal or external to the organism (critical)</td><td>Permanent</td><td>Critical</td></tr><tr><td>2</td><td>Irreversible damage to the environment (major)</td><td>Frequent</td><td>Important</td></tr><tr><td>3</td><td>Reversible harm to environment (limited)</td><td>occasional</td><td>Limited</td></tr><tr><td>4</td><td>Gene for staff (minor)</td><td>Rare</td><td>Low</td></tr></table>
4. Determining the criticality of the environmental impact: Taking into account the previous criteria. This score is obtained by multiplying the elementary scores for each criterion:
The Table 3 below represents the criticality matrix and determines the significance of the environmental impact:
$$
C_{1}=G\times F\times S
$$


## ii. Assessment of Significant Environmental Aspects:
This part consists of 3 steps, this is to identify 2 other criteria related to the identified environmental aspects:
1. Study of regulatory compliance (C): any aspect not satisfying regulatory constraints and necessarily significant
<table><tr><td>0</td><td>Non-compliant</td></tr><tr><td>1</td><td>Compliant or non-regulatory</td></tr></table>
2. Environmental Control Level Assessment (M): Control level is technical, human and organizational. The evaluation must take in to account the principles of prevention
<table><tr><td>1</td><td>Non-existent</td></tr><tr><td>2</td><td>Low</td></tr><tr><td>3</td><td>Good</td></tr><tr><td>4</td><td>maximum</td></tr></table>
### 3. Determination of the criticality of the environmental aspect:
<table><tr><td>C_A = C_1 × C × M</td></tr></table>
The Table 4 represents the criticality matrix and determines the significance of the environmental aspect:
Table 4: Matrix of Environmental Criticality
<table><tr><td rowspan="15">Gravity x Frequency x Sensitivity
(G x F x S)</td><td>64</td><td>0</td><td>64</td><td>128</td><td>192</td><td>256</td></tr><tr><td>48</td><td>0</td><td>48</td><td>96</td><td>144</td><td>192</td></tr><tr><td>36</td><td>0</td><td>36</td><td>72</td><td>108</td><td>144</td></tr><tr><td>32</td><td>0</td><td>32</td><td>64</td><td>96</td><td>128</td></tr><tr><td>27</td><td>0</td><td>27</td><td>54</td><td>81</td><td>108</td></tr><tr><td>18</td><td>0</td><td>18</td><td>36</td><td>54</td><td>72</td></tr><tr><td>16</td><td>0</td><td>16</td><td>32</td><td>48</td><td>64</td></tr><tr><td>12</td><td>0</td><td>12</td><td>24</td><td>36</td><td>48</td></tr><tr><td>9</td><td>0</td><td>9</td><td>18</td><td>27</td><td>36</td></tr><tr><td>8</td><td>0</td><td>8</td><td>16</td><td>24</td><td>32</td></tr><tr><td>4</td><td>0</td><td>4</td><td>8</td><td>12</td><td>16</td></tr><tr><td>3</td><td>0</td><td>3</td><td>6</td><td>9</td><td>12</td></tr><tr><td>2</td><td>0</td><td>2</td><td>4</td><td>6</td><td>8</td></tr><tr><td>1</td><td>0</td><td>1</td><td>2</td><td>3</td><td>4</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>0</td><td>1</td><td>2</td><td>3</td><td>4</td></tr><tr><td colspan="7">Conformity x Proficiency (C x P)</td></tr></table>
<table><tr><td>Significant Aspect (CA<16)</td></tr><tr><td>Assumed or tolerated aspect (16≤CI<81)</td></tr><tr><td>Non-Significant Aspect (CA≥81)</td></tr></table>
## III. CONCLUSION
The ISO 14001 standard is the most suitable and appropriate environmental management system for its application, given its commitments and its proactive aspect that does not require an environmental declaration.
In practice, there is a wide variety of methodologies that make it possible to achieve the environmental objective, some of which are limited to a purely formal approach, while others integrate consultation or worker participation.
The methodology proposed in this work allows an improvement of environmental performance in order to achieve a clearly defined goal, the management and protection of the environment in which the activities take place.
Generating HTML Viewer...
References
11 Cites in Article
Sophia Su,Kevin Baird,Thanh Phan (2023). The association between ethical leadership and environmental activity management: The mediating role of employee environmental empowerment.
Deng Zhang,Yunfeng Wu (2022). Does the green credit policy reduce the carbon emission intensity of heavily polluting industries? -Evidence from China's industrial sectors.
Julian Clifton,Eslam Osman,David Suggett,David Smith (2021). Resolving conservation and development tensions in a small island state: A governance analysis of Curieuse Marine National Park, Seychelles.
Lorenzo Rinaldi,Matteo Vincenzo Rocco,Emanuela Colombo (2023). Assessing critical materials demand in global energy transition scenarios based on the Dynamic Extraction and Recycling Input-Output framework (DYNERIO).
Uğur Karadurmuş,Levent Bilgili (2024). Environmental impacts of synthetic fishing nets from manufacturing to disposal: A case study of Türkiye in life cycle perspective.
Jesus Valero-Gil,Jordi Surroca,Josep Tribo,Leopoldo Gutierrez,Ivan Montiel (2023). Innovation vs. standardization: The conjoint effects of eco-innovation and environmental management systems on environmental performance.
Hsin-Ju Lin,Hwong-Wen Ma (2023). Analysis of green certification standards related to recycled materials involving textiles based on life cycle thinking.
Joel Tickner,Ken Geiser (2004). The precautionary principle stimulus for solutions-and lternativesbased environmental policy.
Martí Casadesús,Frederic Marimon,Iñaki Heras (2008). ISO 14001 diffusion after the success of the ISO 9001 model.
Ahm Shamsuzzoha,Anna-Miia Suihkonen,Camilla Wahlberg,Bojan Jovanovski,Sujan Piya (2023). Development of value proposition to promote green innovation for sustainable organizational development.
Henri Jalo,Henri Pirkkalainen (2024). Effect of user resistance on the organizational adoption of extended reality technologies: A mixed methods study.
No ethics committee approval was required for this article type.
Data Availability
Not applicable for this article.
How to Cite This Article
Dr. Hanane EL FADEL. 2026. \u201cISO 14001 Environmental Standard: Process Approach and Identification of Environmental Aspects and Impacts\u201d. Global Journal of Science Frontier Research - H: Environment & Environmental geology GJSFR-H Volume 24 (GJSFR Volume 24 Issue H1).
Explore published articles in an immersive Augmented Reality environment. Our platform converts research papers into interactive 3D books, allowing readers to view and interact with content using AR and VR compatible devices.
Your published article is automatically converted into a realistic 3D book. Flip through pages and read research papers in a more engaging and interactive format.
Our website is actively being updated, and changes may occur frequently. Please clear your browser cache if needed. For feedback or error reporting, please email [email protected]
Thank you for connecting with us. We will respond to you shortly.