Overview

Principles, requirements and guidelines for adaptation to climate change, covering pre-planning, impact and risk assessment, adaptation planning, implementation, monitoring and reporting.

ISO 14090:2019 specifies principles, requirements and guidelines for adaptation to climate change. It was the first International Standard in this area and it sits at the head of the ISO 14090 family of adaptation standards developed by ISO/TC 207/SC 7. It is applicable to any organization regardless of size, type and nature — including business units, conglomerates, whole industrial sectors, local, regional and national authorities, and natural resource management units.

The standard distinguishes adaptation (managing the consequences of a changing climate) from mitigation (reducing greenhouse gas emissions). Both are needed, and ISO 14090 is deliberately scoped to the former: how an organization understands the climate impacts it faces, decides what to do about them, and embeds those decisions into its own planning and decision-making.

Structure. ISO 14090 describes adaptation as a sequence of elements: pre-planning, in which the organization establishes why it is adapting, its scope and boundaries and who needs to be involved; assessment of climate change impacts, including hazards, exposure, vulnerability and the treatment of uncertainty; adaptation planning, in which priorities and options are identified and adaptation plans developed; implementation, embedding adaptation into policies, strategies, plans, activities and investment decisions; monitoring and evaluation of whether adaptation is working; and reporting and communication to interested parties. A recurring theme is the integration of adaptation within and across organizations rather than treating it as a standalone project.

A distinctive feature of the standard is its explicit handling of uncertainty. Climate projections carry substantial uncertainty over the timescales relevant to infrastructure and long-lived assets, and ISO 14090 provides a structure for making defensible decisions in that context rather than waiting for certainty — for example by preferring options that perform acceptably across a range of plausible futures.

Related standards. ISO 14091 covers vulnerability, impacts and risk assessment in more depth and is the natural companion when carrying out the assessment step. ISO 31000 provides generic risk management guidance that adaptation risk assessment can be aligned with. Organizations running an ISO 14001 environmental management system commonly use ISO 14090 to bring climate adaptation into that system's risk, planning and operational control processes. On the mitigation side, ISO 14064 and ISO 14067 address greenhouse gas quantification.

Certification. Although ISO 14090 contains requirements as well as guidance, it is not a management system standard and there is no ISO certification scheme against it. Conformity is normally demonstrated through the organization's own adaptation plan and reporting, or through second-party review, rather than through certification.

Purpose

To provide organizations with principles, requirements and guidelines for planning, implementing, monitoring and reporting adaptation to climate change, and for integrating adaptation into their wider policies, strategies and decision-making.

Key Benefits

• Structured method for identifying and managing physical climate risks
• Applicable to businesses, public authorities and resource management bodies alike
• Explicit framework for making decisions under climate uncertainty
• Supports integration of adaptation into existing planning and investment processes
• Provides a basis for credible external reporting on climate adaptation
• Aligns with ISO 14001 and ISO 31000 processes already in place

Key Requirements

• Conduct pre-planning: establish purpose, scope, boundaries and interested parties
• Assess climate change impacts, vulnerabilities and associated uncertainties
• Identify and prioritize adaptation options
• Develop adaptation plans with defined responsibilities and timescales
• Implement adaptation by embedding it into policies, strategies, plans and activities
• Monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of adaptation actions
• Report and communicate adaptation activity and outcomes to interested parties
• Review and update adaptation planning as climate information evolves

Who Needs This Standard?

Organizations with long-lived assets or climate-exposed operations, infrastructure owners and utilities, local and regional government, agriculture and water management bodies, sustainability and risk managers, and organizations responding to climate-related disclosure expectations.

Related Standards