ISO’s net-zero draft stalls, and the delay is the point

The first draft of a global corporate net-zero standard has stalled at its member ballot: after the text fell short of the approval threshold, the International Organization for Standardization is reviewing suggested changes to ISO 14060, the draft Standard for Net-Zero Aligned Organizations. “ISO/DIS 14060 did not receive the level of approval required to advance in its current form,” an ISO spokesperson said.

The arithmetic behind that sentence is unforgiving. To advance, a draft international standard must win approval from at least two-thirds of the participating committee members voting, and negative votes must account for no more than one-quarter of all votes cast by ISO member bodies. Fail either test and the draft is referred back to the committee for further consideration, which is where 14060 now sits.

National standards bodies from 88 countries took part in the ballot, and close to 5,000 comments arrived before the Sept. 9 consultation deadline. ISO, the world’s largest voluntary independent standards organization, counts more than 170 national standards bodies among its members—a measure of how many jurisdictions would eventually have to translate this text into practice if it advances.

ISO’s external communications policy withholds detailed ballot information, including how individual member bodies voted and the reasons behind their positions, so the coalition against the draft can only be inferred. Two people close to the negotiations, who requested anonymity because they are not authorized to comment on the process, said comments from earlier discussions suggest fossil-fuel producing nations were one group that voted against moving the draft forward. Other countries voting no may have wanted more time to consider the proposal, including its rules on how carbon credits can be used.

The referral lands midstream of a project with wider reach: ISO’s relationship with the Greenhouse Gas Protocol has grown closer over the past year, and the two organizations are working to unify their carbon accounting standards, with a draft due in early 2027. Interest in the ISO framework has intensified partly for that reason. Whichever committee writes the accounting rules writes the outer boundary of what a corporate net-zero claim can mean, and that boundary is currently being drawn in two rooms at once.

Carbon markets, as this publication has argued, are consolidating around assurance rather than supply, and the advantage is shifting to whoever controls the rails. A corporate net-zero standard is a rail-setting instrument in the most literal sense: it decides what a company must measure, what it may net out, and what an assurer can sign. Handing the draft back to committee does not settle those questions; it postpones them, and postponement is not neutrality.

The delay carries a cost that will not show up in any ballot tally. Companies making net-zero claims in the meantime will keep reaching for voluntary frameworks and national rules, and the resulting mix is exactly where greenwashing disputes get argued. A standard that cannot clear its own committee leaves the question of what substantiates a net-zero claim to whoever is loudest or most local, a poor substitute for a text more than 170 standards bodies helped write.

None of this makes the ballot a failure of process. ISO’s thresholds exist to stop a slim majority from imposing a measurement regime on dissenters, and a near-miss that triggers a rewrite is the mechanism working as designed. The live question is narrower and harder: whether the committee can reconcile the carbon-credit language with the members that rejected it, or whether the unification with the Greenhouse Gas Protocol becomes the venue where that argument gets relitigated under a different name. The carbon-credit question is the one to watch, because it is the rule that decides how much of a net-zero claim can be bought rather than built.

ISO’s annual general meeting runs Sept. 28 to Oct. 2 in Paris, and the committee is obligated to work through the feedback before determining how to proceed. The date that matters more is early 2027, when the convergence draft with the Greenhouse Gas Protocol is due; companies writing net-zero language today are drafting against a standard that does not yet exist.