ISO 14001 is a worldwide standard for managing the environment. It was created by the International Organization for Standardization, a group based in Geneva, Switzerland, representing 157 countries.

ISO comes from the Greek word isos, which means "equal." To avoid dozens of acronyms in multiple languages, ISO is the organization's shorthand name, no matter what country or what language.

This nongovernmental organization was founded in 1947 "to facilitate the international coordination and unification of industrial standards" and thereby prevent the marketplace chaos that would obviously result if, for example, there were not a single standard for metric screw tolerances, or if there were 17 different film speeds instead of just ASA and DIN.

In the 1980s, the organization developed ISO 9001, the widely used system for managing quality. ISO 14001 was unveiled in 1996.