Abstract

The adoption of international standards for Environmental Management Systems (EMSs) has grown significantly over the last years. Following this successful path some other management standards which deal with environmental and energy management issues have been launched as well. This is the case of ISO 50001, a certifiable international standard to adopt an Energy Management System (EnMS), which was launched in 2011 by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). From then on, ISO 50001 certifications have experienced a huge growth: from 459 in 2011 to 1981 in 2012, with a total annual growth of 332%. Regardless of the huge growth, within the scholarly literature only case-based studies have been published on the early adoption of this standard. In order to fulfill this gap this contribution summarizes some of the preliminary results of an empirical study carried out in Spain with the participation of a total of 57 early ISO 50001 certified organizations, aimed at analyzing the early adoption of ISO 50001 standard. The findings facilitate the characterization of ISO 50001 certified organizations and anticipate benefits of the adoption of the standard.

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