Renewing environmental certification in times of crisis

The certification of environmental management systems based on international meta-standards such as ISO 14001 and the Eco Management and Audit Scheme has become one of the most common environmental practices. Nevertheless, the financial and economic difficulties faced by many organizations raise the issue of certification renewal and may have an impact on the trends toward decertification recently observed, notably in the case of the later standard. Surprisingly, this issue remains almost unexplored in the literature. The objective of this paper is to analyze the intention to renew environmental certifications in time of crisis in light of the motivations, obstacles and benefits of this standard. For that purpose, correlation and regression analyses were used with data obtained from 361 Spanish certified firms. The novelty of the study lies in analyzing for the first time in the literature how the intention to renew environmental certifications is shaped by several factors within a context of deep economic crisis. The article contains practical implications for the stakeholders of third party environmental certification, notably managers and policy-makers.