ISO 14031 is the international standard that sets out how an organisation chooses environmental indicators and uses them to judge its own environmental performance over time.
Its third edition, published in 2021, gives the process, the kinds of indicator to pick from, and the principles the resulting information must meet. It is guidance, not a set of targets, and it says plainly that it does not establish environmental performance levels, so the target stays yours.
An audit asks whether you met the rules on the day somebody looked. Environmental performance evaluation asks whether your numbers have moved in the right direction ever since.
What ISO 14031 actually does
The standard is short on rules and long on method. Here are the details worth having in front of you.
| Detail | ISO 14031 |
|---|---|
| Full title | Environmental management, environmental performance evaluation, guidelines |
| Current edition | 2021, the third edition, published in March that year |
| Status | Published, with its five-year review closed in June 2026 and no outcome recorded yet |
| Type | Guidance you follow and cite, never something you get certified to |
| Indicators it defines | Environmental condition indicators, plus performance indicators split into management and operational |
| Published by | ISO/TC 207/SC 4, the environmental performance evaluation subcommittee |
Forty-four pages carry all of it, in an unusual shape. Clause 3 is six groups of definitions and fills most of the front half. Clause 4 is the entire method, from planning through using the data to reviewing and improving what you built.
It has no normative references at all, so nothing else has to be bought to read it, and the European adoption EN ISO 14031:2021 carries the same text. The 2021 edition is a minor revision of the 2013 one, not a rewrite.
The full record sits on ISO's own catalogue page for the standard.
The two kinds of indicator
This is the part people come to ISO 14031 for, and the rest of the method rests on it.
An indicator, in the standard's words, is a quantitative, qualitative or binary variable that can be measured or described. The standard sorts them into two categories, and one of those splits again.
Environmental condition indicators
An environmental condition indicator, or ECI, describes the state of the environment itself at local, regional, national or global level. Air quality in the valley your plant sits in is one.
The standard is candid about the catch. ECIs are hard to tie to one organisation's operations unless it is the only source of a particular pollutant, which is why regulators use them more than companies do.
Environmental performance indicators
An environmental performance indicator, or EPI, describes your own performance rather than the world's condition. These are the ones an organisation runs its decisions on, and they split in two.
A management performance indicator, or MPI, reports the effort going in. Training delivered, audits completed, budget committed.
An operational performance indicator, or OPI, reports what the operation actually did. Tonnes emitted, water drawn, packaging placed on the market.
The three point at three different things, which is easiest to see drawn out.
Mixing them up is expensive. An MPI that climbs while its matching OPI stands still means the money went out and nothing moved.
Five ways to express the same number
Choosing the indicator is only half the job. The standard sets out five forms the same underlying figure can take, and the form decides what the number is able to tell you.
- Direct. The raw figure, such as tonnes of a contaminant emitted.
- Relative. The same figure set against something else, such as tonnes emitted per tonne of product made, or per unit of sales.
- Indexed. The figure expressed against a reference point, such as this year's emissions as a percentage of a baseline year.
- Aggregated. Data of the same type from several sources combined, such as one total summed across every site.
- Weighted. The figure adjusted by a factor reflecting how significant it is.
The standard warns that aggregating and weighting have to be done with care, so the result stays verifiable and comparable and the assumptions behind any transformation stay visible.
The choice matters more than it looks. A direct figure rises when you sell more, so a growing company can cut its waste per unit every year and still report a bigger number every year.
How the evaluation runs
ISO 14031 organises the work as a Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle, the same loop ISO 14001 uses for an environmental management system. It is built to run continuously rather than once.
Planning covers two steps, planning the evaluation itself and then selecting the indicators. Doing covers four, collecting the data, converting it into information about your performance, assessing that against your own objectives, and reporting it.
Checking and acting is the shortest stage and the one most often skipped. It means asking whether the evaluation still tells you anything useful, and changing it when the answer is no.
What makes the information trustworthy
The standard sets four principles the performance information has to meet, and they are what separate a number somebody acts on from a number somebody argues with.
| Principle | What it asks of the information |
|---|---|
| Relevance | It bears on the environmental aspects you are actually managing |
| Completeness | Nothing material has been left out |
| Consistency and accuracy | Past, present and future figures can be compared validly |
| Transparency | Users can reach and understand the data well enough to decide with reasonable confidence |
Miss any one of them and the evaluation still produces numbers. They just will not survive the first person who asks where they came from.
Who needs ISO 14031
The scope is deliberately wide. The standard applies to all organisations regardless of type, size, location and complexity, which is unqualified even by ISO's standards.
The more useful question is when it earns its keep, and there are two clear cases.
The first is an organisation already running an environmental management system, which has to judge its performance against its own policy and objectives and needs a defensible way to choose the measures.
The second is the one people miss. ISO 14031 says in its introduction that environmental performance evaluation may support a management system or be used independently, so a company with no certificate can still use the method in full.
Why ISO 14031 matters for producers
If you file extended producer responsibility returns, you are already producing an operational performance indicator. You have probably never treated it as one.
Your EPR filing is already a measurement
Under the EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation, Regulation (EU) 2025/40, Article 44(7) requires a producer or its scheme to report to the national register by 1 June each year, covering the full preceding calendar year.
Annex IX sets out what gets reported. It is quantities by weight of packaging categories the producer made available on that market for the first time.
That is a direct measure of an operational performance indicator, the rawest of the five forms, and on its own it says very little about performance.
Turning a return into a trend
The same annual reporting data expressed relatively, per tonne of product shipped or per unit of turnover, shows whether packaging intensity is falling. Indexed against a baseline year, it shows by how much.
There is money in the answer. Article 6 of the same regulation modulates producer contributions according to recyclability performance grades, so a portfolio's recyclability is worth tracking rather than filing and forgetting.
The regulation hands back the audit distinction too. Article 44(7) lets member states require the reported information to be audited by independent auditors, which confirms the filing is right without saying whether performance improved.
One honest limit
ISO 14031 is not a compliance route and never claims to be. The regulation names no ISO standard anywhere in its text, and the standard sets no performance levels at all.
It changes nothing about what you have to file. It only changes whether the filing tells you anything.
Where ISO 14031 sits among the other standards
Three documents get confused with this one, and the split is clean once you see it.
| The document | What it is for |
|---|---|
| ISO 14031 | Measuring and evaluating your own environmental performance over time |
| ISO 14001 | Running the management system that acts on what the measurement shows |
| The CSRD | Disclosing agreed information outward in a form regulators and investors can compare |
Measuring, managing and disclosing are three different jobs, and ISO 14031 only does the first. The Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive governs what you publish and ISO 14001 gives you the system that acts, while this standard tells you how to know.
Two more sit close enough to name. ISO 14031 cites ISO 14033 for collecting data and ISO 19011 for auditing, which keeps the audit and the evaluation in separate documents as well as separate paragraphs.
The footprint standards work at another scale again. ISO 14067 quantifies the carbon footprint of one product, and the life cycle assessment standards quantify one product's impacts across its life. ISO 14031 evaluates a whole organisation, repeatedly, on whatever it chose to track.
Frequently asked questions about ISO 14031
Below are the seven questions producers ask most often about ISO 14031.
What is ISO 14031?
ISO 14031 is the international standard, in its 2021 third edition, that gives guidelines for designing and using environmental performance evaluation. It sets out how to choose environmental indicators and turn the data behind them into a judgement about performance.
Is ISO 14031 a certification?
No. It is guidance you follow and cite rather than a scheme you are audited against. ISO 14001 is the certifiable standard in this family, and ISO 14031 supports it without adding a certificate of its own.
What edition of ISO 14031 is current?
The 2021 edition, which is the third. It replaced the 2013 second edition as a minor revision, and its five-year systematic review closed in June 2026 with no outcome recorded yet, so 2021 remains the version to cite.
Do you need ISO 14001 to use ISO 14031?
No. The standard says environmental performance evaluation can support a management system or be used independently, so an organisation with no ISO 14001 certificate can still apply the method in full.
What is the difference between an MPI and an OPI?
A management performance indicator reports the effort management puts in, such as training delivered or budget committed. An operational performance indicator reports what the operation itself did, such as tonnes emitted or packaging placed on the market.
Does ISO 14031 say what good environmental performance looks like?
No, and it says so directly. The scope states that the document does not establish environmental performance levels, so it gives you the method for measuring and leaves the target to you, your policy or your regulator.
How does ISO 14031 relate to EU packaging rules?
Not directly, because the EU packaging regulation names no ISO standard at all. The link is practical, since the packaging tonnages producers already report each year are operational performance indicators in this standard's terms.
