Environmental Aspects, Impacts, and Risk Assessment
Domain 6 tests the core analytical skill of environmental auditing: separating activities from consequences, and judging significance defensibly.
Core rules
- An aspect is an element of an activity, product, or service that interacts with the environment; an impact is the resulting change. “Solvent evaporation” is an aspect; “contribution to photochemical smog” is an impact.
- Assess normal, abnormal (start-up, shutdown, maintenance), and emergency conditions.
- Significance criteria should be defined in advance: severity, likelihood, scale, regulatory exposure, sensitivity of the receiving environment, interested-party concern.
- Include indirect aspects from contractors, suppliers, and transport where the organization can influence them.
- ISO 14001 requires a lifecycle perspective, not a full LCA.
- Outputs feed 6.1.2 controls, 8.1 operational control, 8.2 emergency preparedness, and 9.1 monitoring.
Worked example
A new solvent degreaser is installed. Aspects: fugitive VOC emissions during normal running, a vapour slug at start-up, and a spill during drum transfer. Impacts: local air quality and ozone-precursor contribution. Significance is judged high because of the permitted VOC threshold and the site's proximity to housing. Controls follow from that judgement - enclosure and extraction, a defined start-up sequence, spill kit and bunding, and VOC monitoring with records. If the register lists only “air emissions” with no operating conditions and no significance rationale, the finding is against 6.1.2.
Traps that cost marks
- Swapping aspect and impact in the register or the report.
- Assessing only normal operations, which hides emergency and start-up risk.
- Using a significance matrix with no stated criteria behind the scores.
- Omitting contractor activities inside the site boundary.
- Freezing the register after certification instead of updating it for change.