July 2012
abstract
Responsabilité & Environnement
Standards: principles, history, trends and prospects
Issue editor:
Marie-Josèphe CARRIEU-COSTA
Issue 67
Editorial : la normalisation : principes, histoire, évolutions et perspectives par Marie-Josèphe CARRIEU-COSTA
By Alan BRYDEN
Amble-Consultants
1 - Standards: History, principles and issues
Making standards and reaching a consensus
By Olivier PEYRAT
Directeur général de l’Association Française de Normalisation (AFNOR)
Any serious work on standards starts with a section entitled “Definitions”. Forming a consensus on standards must start with an agreement, beyond differences in traditions and languages, on the names of things and concepts. Sacrifice tradition!
Assessing compliance with standards and building trust
By Daniel PIERRE
Directeur général du Cofrac, Vice-président de l’European cooperation for Accreditation (E.A.)
Accreditation, defined as “controlling the control”, is a guarantee of the competence and impartiality of accreditation organizations. It helps build up trust in the services provided by these organizations at the national and international levels.
Standards for channeling the ocean of data
By Isabelle BOYDENS
Docteur en Philosophie et Lettres (orientation « Sciences de l’Information »), chargée de cours à l’Université Libre de Bruxelles
Just as Xerxes lashed the sea, the persons who design data bases are trying to channel an ocean. They must take up the challenge of homogenizing the irreducible heterogeneity of empirical observations by using formal standards. This continuous interaction has vast effects in the social, legal, medical, military and environmental fields. Studying it helps us draw up operational protocols for reducing the risk of nonmatching data.
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By Jean-Charles GUIBERT
Commissariat à l’énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives (CEA)
2 - Many fields of application and high, global stakes
Between firms and standards: A marriage of convenience?
By Dominique HOESTLANDT
Président de Sigm@ Conseil SAS
Why do firms accept to take part in drawing up so many standards? Because they have no choice? True… but, too, because some of them find this activity worthwhile.
Standards for the building industry: The viewpoint of the Centre Scientifique et Technique du Bâtiment
By Carole LE GALL
Directrice générale du Centre Scientifique et Technique du Bâtiment (CSTB)
Is a common language necessary to build a house, a high-rise or a skyscraper? The myths and facts of making standards in the construction industry are reviewed; and a few common misunderstandings, brought to light.
The building trade, standards and architects
By Adrienne COSTA
Architecte DPLG, Fondatrice et présidente de « SCOPIS Ville Paysage Culture »
Architecture is among the fields highly concerned with standards.Whether related to construction, security, comfort, accessibility, urbanism or the environment, standards condition the right to erect buildings, property rights for using buildings and the openness of buildings to the public. Standards, most of them dictated by the insurance companies that mutualize risks, are enforced from the design of a project and throughout its realization. Owing to their accumulation and complexity, they are a regular part of the work of creation in architecture everywhere around the world, France unexcepted.
Wikipedia, a project without standards?
By Alexandre MOATTI
Ingénieur en chef des Mines (Conseil général de l’Economie, de l’Industrie, de l’Energie et des Technologies), chercheur associé à l’université Paris VII-Denis Diderot (laboratoire SPHERE UMR 7219), auteur d’ouvrages de vulgarisation et d’histoire des sciences (voir www.moatti.net), membre (depuis 2007) et ancien administrateur de l’association Wikimédia France
Wikipedia and the International Standards Organization both represent a crystallization of knowledge: of knowhow in the case of ISO standards and of encyclopedic knowledge in the case of Wikipedia. Both are based on reaching a consensus and on collaboration in the form of written texts. From the start, Wikipedia adopted strict rules, in particular its five founding principles. The need for standards has grown with the size of this encyclopedia.
3 - Standards, security and societal responsibility
The contribution of standards to public policies in favor of sustainable development
By Viviane APIED
Responsable ministérielle pour la normalisation - Ministère de l’Ecologie, du Développement durable et de l’Energie
Governments have long made standards a part of their public policy toolbox, along with (and often complementary to) regulations, which are still the preferred means used by public authorities, at least in France. The emergence of new issues related to sustainable development has imparted a new stimulus to the making of norms while orienting this process differently from the past. This process also opens a new dimension for the involvement of public authorities.
How standards contribute to industrial safety and security
By Jacques REPUSSARD
Directeur Général de l’Institut de Radioprotection et de Sûreté Nucléaire (IRSN)
Standards were born in the period after WW II in response to the need for economies of scale, lower costs and interoperability. This process’s technical scope was then enlarged both beyond industry to encompass all problems related to a product’s presence on a given market and beyond issues of safety to the environmental aspects of manufacturing.Given the emergence of the big domestic market in Europe during the 1980s, standards, till then national, were “harmonized” thanks to the joint actions of the European Commission and standard-making organizations in Europe.
Environmental security in the service of human health
By Marc MORTUREUX
Directeur général de l’Agence nationale de sécurité sanitaire de l’alimentation, de l’environnement et du travail (Anses)
PBC, bisphenol A, pesticides, micro and nanoparticulates, electromagnetic waves… these are a few examples of real or potential threats to our environment and health. How to manage through standards and regulations the hard-to-achieve balance between the growth of technology and the protection of the environment and public health? How to base these managerial decisions on an objective evaluation of the current state of scientific knowledge? In the coming years, what issues related to the scientific assessment of risks will arise in response to the many questions raised by society? This article tries to provide answers through concrete examples that have often hit the front pages in France or worldwide.
Societal responsibility, a new frontier for making standards
By Pierre MAZEAU
Chef de mission RSE au sein de la direction Développement durable d’EDF
“Societal responsibility” was the very field where intervention by the International Standards Organization was not expected, nor even welcomed. How did the ISO overcome opposition, rally support and adapt its procedures to succeed in issuing ISO 26000, “Guidelines related to societal responsibility”, on 1 November 2010? Fewer than eighteen months afterwards, ISO 26000 had already become an unavoidable reference mark for societal responsibility. The author, a practitioner of social responsibility in a big corporation, was involved in making this standard during all phases from preliminary work up till publication.
Miscellany
Session of 2 March 2011: The French system for insuring natural risks is being reformed
By Pierre-Louis DUBOURDEAU
Adjoint au chef du service de Prévention des risques et des nuisances à la direction régionale et interdépartementale de l’Environnement et de l’Energie d’Ile-de-France
Minutes of the conference “Financial instruments for coping with the risks of disasters in France and the world” organized by the Association française pour la Prévention des Catastrophes Naturelles and the Conseil général de l’Économie, de l’Industrie, de l’Énergie et des Technologies Pierre-Louis Dubourdeau, Louis Margueritte and Vincent Designolle Pierre-Louis DUBOURDEAU Adjoint au chef du service de Prévention des risques et des nuisances à la direction régionale et interdépartementale de l’Environnement et de l’Energie d’Ile-de-France Louis MARGUERITTE Adjoint au chef de brigade au Secrétariat général de l’Autorité de Contrôle Prudentiel Vincent DESIGNOLLE Chef du service des Risques naturels et technologiques à la direction régionale de l’Environnement, de l’Aménagement et du Logement des Pays de la Loire The current system for insuring natural risks, set up under an act of 13 July 1982, is hybrid in that it foresees joint interventions by private insurance funds and public authorities in worst-case scenarios. By emphasizing prevention, the awareness of stakeholders, the formation of a “culture of risk” and the reduction of damage, the reform under way is coherent both with the other procedures of prevention adopted by public authorities and with changes in the regulatory framework of the insurance industry at the European level (Solvency II)
Session of 8 March 2011: Global insurance for coping with catastrophes
By Luc DELAGE
Ingénieur des Mines et contrôleur des assurances à l’Autorité de Contrôle Prudentiel
Minutes of the conference “Financial instruments for coping with the risks of disasters in France and the world” organized by the Association française pour la Prévention des Catastrophes Naturelles and the Conseil général de l’Économie, de l’Industrie, de l’Énergie et des Technologies The question now arising is not whether we will have to cope with large-scale catastrophes but, instead, of what to do to prevent them. How to insure a risk that cannot be insured? This involves both working on prevention so as to lead the insured to adopt positive behaviors and diffusing the good practices for helping us conduct the current reform of the French system of compensation for natural catastrophes. As pointed out during the session of 8 March, natural catastrophes though fatal should not be experienced with a passive sense of fatality.