With Amendment 1:2024 “Climate action changes”, climate change entered ISO 45001 expressly — the standard on occupational health and safety management systems, transposed in Italy as UNI EN ISO 45001:2023+A1 in October 2024. And with Accredia Technical Circular 24/2026 the conformity of work equipment became a condition for issuing and maintaining certificates. What does this mean, in practice, for certified organisations?
That climate change was an environmental theme we knew; that it was also an occupational health and safety theme was made explicit, in standardisation terms, by the Amendments ISO published in February 2024. A dedicated deep-dive is useful, given that the theme intercepts one of the liveliest areas of attention at European level too, as shown by the constant oversight of the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA).
The “Climate action changes” Amendment
In February 2024 ISO published a coordinated series of Amendments, called “Climate action changes”, introducing into over thirty management-system standards — from ISO 9001 to ISO 14001, from ISO/IEC 27001 to ISO 45001 — an express reference to climate change. The change operates on clause 4 of the harmonised structure: the organisation, in analysing its context, must determine whether climate change is a relevant issue and consider that interested parties may have climate-related requirements. For ISO 45001, the Amendment is ISO 45001:2018/Amd 1:2024. In Italy, transposition took place with UNI EN ISO 45001:2023+A1, published in October 2024. As clarified when the Amendments were presented, this is not the introduction of new controls but a making-explicit: an intellectually honest context analysis should already have interrogated the climate. But making it explicit carries weight: what before could be neglected without consequence must today be considered and, if deemed relevant, overseen — and auditors verify it.
Why climate is an OSH risk
The point deserves to be taken out of abstraction. Climate change affects workers’ health and safety through now well-documented channels: heat stress from heatwaves, hitting construction, agriculture and logistics in particular; extreme weather events, affecting those working outdoors or in emergencies; the geographic spread of disease vectors; the deterioration of air quality; and, not least, the indirect risks connected to the transition itself, from new energy technologies to new materials. For the OSH management system, this translates into precise operational questions: does the risk assessment consider the climate scenarios of the territory where one operates? Are organisational measures — such as rescheduling working hours on days of extreme heat — planned or improvised? Does health surveillance intercept emerging risk profiles? Do emergency plans contemplate extreme events?
The Italian and European framework
In Italy the voluntary-standardisation perspective joins a binding framework that already requires the employer to assess all risks to workers’ health and safety: climate is therefore not an exotic addition but a lens that makes explicit what a complete assessment should already contain. At European level, EU-OSHA devotes research and operational tools to the theme, in the wake of growing attention to so-called emerging risks. For ISO 45001-certified organisations, the Amendment is thus also an alignment opportunity: integrating climate scenarios into context analysis and risk assessment means, at once, satisfying the voluntary standard and strengthening the robustness of binding compliance.
45001 certification and work equipment: Accredia Technical Circular 24/2026
Finally, there is a very recent national front that anyone holding, or requesting, UNI EN ISO 45001 certification cannot ignore. With Technical Circular DC No. 24/2026 of 22 June 2026, Accredia set out the provisions for the “conformity assessment of work equipment, for the purposes of issuing and maintaining UNI EN ISO 45001 certificates”, implementing the requirements of Appendix A “Legal compliance as a part of accredited OH&SMS certification” of IAF MD 22:2023. Certification bodies must verify, “adopting the sampling principle, in line with a risk-based approach”, how certified organisations ensure the maintenance of work-equipment conformity. In particular, the body must ascertain that the organisation has “carried out the conformity assessment for each single item of work equipment in use/in operation, under Article 70 of Legislative Decree 81/08”: for machinery post-1996, conformity with the provisions transposing the product directives — with the caveat that Directive 2006/42/EC is “fully replaced by Regulation (EU) 2023/1230 from 19 January 2027”; for equipment pre-1996, compliance with the minimum requirements of Annex V of Legislative Decree 81/08.
For non-conforming equipment, the circular requires the taking out of service of dangerous non-adaptable items or “a programme of intervention for equipment declared repairable/adaptable”, with measures, timelines, responsibilities and investments, whose progress “must be monitored over time by the Certification Body”; pending adaptation, the equipment “cannot remain in service”. Particular attention is devoted to substantial modifications of machinery, for which the organisation must demonstrate it has acted in conformity with Regulation (EU) 2023/1230. The systemic message is clear: the legal conformity of equipment stably enters the perimeter of the OSH certification audit, with punctual documentary evidence that the audit team is required to record — a perimeter that presupposes, in the bodies, audit teams equipped with the additional OSH-specific competences required by the technical specification UNI CEI ISO/IEC TS 17021-10.
Conclusions
The thread linking the ISO 45001 climate Amendment, Accredia’s new provisions on work equipment and the European regulatory season is clear: climate has become a structural element of every organisation’s context, and management systems, of whatever family, are called to take charge of it. For occupational health and safety the stakes are particularly concrete: behind every climate scenario there are exposed workers. In the light of the above, one wonders whether organisations will take up the prompt of international standardisation: adding a paragraph on climate to the system documents is one thing, genuinely integrating climate scenarios into the risk assessment is another, and it is on this integration that the effective protection of the people who work depends, in the face of a climate that changes faster than procedures.