The international standard series ISO 14000 "Environmental Management Systems" exist to help organizations comply with existing environmental laws and minimize how their operations negatively affect the environment in a continually improvement process. ISO 14000 pertain to the process rather than to a product itself. The overall idea is to establish an organized approach to systematically reduce the impacts which an organization can control. The material included in this family of standards is very broad. The major parts of ISO 14000 are:

• ISO 14001: the generic standard against which organizations are assessed
• ISO 14004: a guidance document explaining the requirements in more detail
• ISO 14020 series (14020 to 14025): Environmental Labeling and Product Declarations
• ISO 14030: discusses post-production environmental assessment
• ISO 14031: Evaluation of Environmental Performance
• ISO 14040 series (14040 to 14044): Life Cycle Assessment methodologies and environment goal setting
• ISO 14050: terms and definitions
• ISO 14062: discusses making improvements to environmental impacts
• ISO 14063: communication on environmental impacts
• ISO 14064:2006: specific document on greenhouse gases management.

The ISO 14000 approach is voluntary and flexible enough to be adapted for all kind of products, services and organisations. It is closely linked to the EU environmental legislation when the European Community decided to issue its EMAS regulation scheme allowing voluntary participation by organisations in a Community Eco-Management Scheme (EMAS) in 1992. CEN argued that its members preferred to develop the EMAS standards at international level in ISO TC 207 "Environmental Management". The European Commission agreed and CEN set up a so called "Bridging Committee" in order to help to compare the requirements of the EMAS and ISO14000 standards to grant conformity status (only to those parts of the ISO standard that are in agreement with the Regulation). The first Revision of EMAS (Regulation EC No 761/2001) resulted then in abolishing the detailed EMAS Annex A to replace it in its entirety by ISO 14001.

The latest version of the standard ISO 14001 dates from 2004. The former version (from 1996) was revised with the objective to bring the standards ISO 9001 on quality management systems and ISO 14001 on environmental management systems closer to each other in order to facilitate certification work and to have the company certified for both systems in one go.

Currently ECOS is participating with an expert in the ISO/TC 207 SC1 WG3 work on Guidelines for  a staged implementation of Environmental Management Systems in small organisations. This work started in 2006 and is planned to be finalised in the end of 2008. What regards this latest work, CEN was given a mandate from the European Commission  regarding a guidance to staged approach for SMEs in 2005. However, CEN chose to once again forward this mandate to international level (ISO) instead of developing the guide at European level. This has now proved problematic since the European Commission requests full inclusion of the EMAS regulation in the guide while ISO does not see the benefits of using the European EMAS regulation in their international standard.

In 2010 ECOS is following with specific attention the new Sub-committee TC 207/SC7 on "Greenhouse gas management" which plans to explore standardisation for carbon footprint, carbon labelling and carbon offsetting. These new topics interest environmental NGOs.