Ensuring no one goes hungry on World Food Day. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), nearly 690 million people are hungry and the COVID-19 pandemic could potentially add a further 83 to 132 million people. What’s more, around 14 % of food produced is lost each year [...]
Celebrating a new standard in development on International Plain Language Day. What’s in a word? Defining our future and describing our past, words hold much power as they convey what we need to understand to function in society. But poorly written texts or bureaucratic jargon can jeopardize that power and [...]
Global standards leaders IEC, ISO and ITU join forces to better serve cities of the future. The first meeting of a new joint task force to coordinate international standardization for smart cities was held last week to discuss global learnings from the COVID-19 crisis and highlight the scale and urgency [...]
ISO offers international guidance and webinar to help the tourism industry get through the current crisis. When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, the world literally stopped still. With no-one going anywhere, the tourism industry was hard hit, suffering a drop in revenues of some USD 460 billion globally in the first half [...]
A new committee for consumer incidents has just been formed. Lifts breaking down, playground equipment giving way and faulty products are just some of the ways people get hurt every day, and often the first point of call is to attribute blame. But finding the root cause in all its [...]
From global navigation to exploring the furthest reaches of the universe, thousands of satellites orbit our planet, helped on their journey by ISO standards. With uses that include GPS and meteorology, mapping and scientific research, satellites play an important role in how we collect and transmit information around the world. More [...]
The specification for barcodes on medication packaging has just been updated. The correct identification, labelling and tracking of medicinal products throughout the whole supply chain is essential to prevent fraudulent pills from sneaking onto the market. International machine-readable coding of product packaging is an effective way of achieving that, and [...]
The International Standard for IBAN has just been updated. Long gone are the days where money wired overseas took days to arrive, and sometimes didn’t arrive at all. The International Bank Account Number (IBAN) allows for the safe and rapid transfer of money all over the world, as it represents [...]
A new standard for language learning services just published With more than seven thousand different languages across the world, it’s no wonder that learning a new language is both appealing in the job market and useful for discovering new lands and cultures. Most languages take many hundreds of hours of [...]
Some 700 participants from national standards bodies of 141 countries attended a special virtual event organized by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) on 24 September 2020, in lieu of the General Assembly which was due to take place in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. This has been described as the largest virtual [...]