Environmental Management Systems in the Context of Sustainable Development – the Identification of Open Problems

The cognitive objective of this paper was to establish the roles played by standardized environmental management systems in the process of the sustainable development of an organization. At present this process is analysed mainly in the context of the UN Sustainable Development Goals formulated within the scope of the 2030 Agenda for Global Action. The main research method used by the authors was a systematic literature review. The result of the conducted review was the identification of motives and conditions for the implementation of environmental management systems as well as advantages and disadvantages resulting from such implementation. The authors also indicated the major causes of failures in the introduction and improvement of systems consistent with the ISO 14001 standard and presented conditions determining their successful implementation. In the final part of the paper, they included recommendations for further research directions in the examined problem area.