Climate change is 'the new normal' says BSI director who helped create ISO/PAS 45007
For health and safety leaders, climate change is no longer just an environmental issue – it is reshaping what it means to keep people safe at work. That’s the premise behind new international guidance from BSI (British Standards Institution), which aims to help organizations protect workers as heat waves, floods, wildfires and other extremes become part of daily operations rather than rare emergencies.
The new guidance, ISO/PAS 45007:2026, sits within the same international committee that developed ISO 45001, the widely used occupational health and safety (OH&S) management standard. Anne Hayes, Director of Standards Development and Sectors at BSI, explains that the new document was developed through ISO’s global technical committee on occupational health and safety, where BSI serves as secretariat, meaning it helps coordinate and drive the work of the international group.
From rare disaster to everyday risk
In practice, ISO/PAS 45007 is intended to help organizations systematically consider how both climate change and climate action affect worker health and safety. Hayes says many employers have historically treated climate-related events as occasional disruptions within their OH&S systems – the kind of low-likelihood, high-impact incidents you might see in a risk register. But that framing no longer fits reality.
“There are things happening around the globe every year all the time,” she notes, pointing to examples ranging from “fires in Greece to flooding in the UK to extensive snow in the US.” Rather than treating such events as exceptions, she argues, organizations need a methodology to factor them into day‑to‑day occupational health and safety planning.
The guidance is deliberately broad and sector‑agnostic, designed for use by organizations of any size, whether or not they already have ISO 45001 in place. That flexibility matters in countries like Canada, where risk profiles vary sharply between sectors and regions. While Hayes is most familiar with the UK context, she notes that traditional high‑risk sectors such as construction and manufacturing are obvious candidates. She adds that the standard speaks equally to other resource‑heavy industries that are central to Canada’s economy, such as mining, oil and gas, and forestry.
What ISO/PAS 45007 means for Canadian industries on the climate front lines
For Canadian health and safety leaders in those fields, the guidance offers a structured way to think about increasingly frequent extremes: prolonged heat and drought on job sites, wildfire smoke affecting outdoor and indoor air quality, or flooding that disrupts infrastructure and exposes workers to new hazards. Rather than only asking how to respond when something goes wrong, ISO/PAS 45007 encourages organizations to build climate factors into their regular OH&S systems – aligning with the kind of Plan‑Do‑Check‑Act cycle many already use.
That can translate into very practical questions at the site level. Hayes points to basic but critical considerations for outdoor and physically demanding work. “How do you consider where they’ve got adequate shade? How do you consider they’ve got adequate hydration?” she asks. In some cases, employers may need to adjust work patterns as conditions shift. That might mean changing hours so crews start earlier and finish earlier, “or they take a break in the middle of the day” to avoid peak heat.
The point, she stresses, is to move from reactive to proactive management. “This guidance and this management alongside your management system in place will mean that you are taking active steps rather than waiting for something to happen,” she says. As with OH&S more broadly, the emphasis is on anticipating risks, putting mitigations in place, and having mechanisms to learn and improve when incidents do occur.
Hayes is clear that ISO/PAS 45007 is relevant whether or not an organization already uses ISO 45001. For those with a formal management system, the new guidance can be integrated into existing structures; for others, it offers a practical starting framework to think systematically about climate‑related health and safety risks.
Ultimately, she says, the new standard reflects a shift in mindset as much as in management practice. “This standard is taking something that we’ve considered as a freak event or an unusual occurrence, and it’s accepting that it’s normal,” Hayes explains. Employers, she argues, can no longer treat climate‑driven disruptions as one‑off disasters to be handled through crisis or business continuity plans alone.
“It’s the new normal,” she says. “Sadly, it is the new normal. And until we get through it, we need to react to that in that way.”
For health and safety leaders in Canada and around the world, ISO/PAS 45007 is an invitation – and a nudge – to bring that new normal squarely into the heart of how they protect workers every day.
