According to ISO 17000:2020, this is the demonstration that specified requirements are fulfilled. This is determined through activities such as certification, verification and validation. Those requirements may be applied to a product, project, claim, data, organization, or even a process, also called the object of the conformity assessment.

Conformity assessment activities are performed by auditors working for third-party organizations called conformity assessment bodies (what a surprise!). An auditor’s work is to evaluate the object of conformity assessment against the selected standard. For those who have accompanied this community for enough time, you’ve likely heard a lot about fuel-related certification schemes such as the one developed by RSB where “the object” is fuel, the standard is RSB CORSIA, and the conformity assessment bodies are SCS or SGS Tecnos.

Example:   An airline states in its annual ESG report that its total GHG emissions for that year were 50 million tons of CO2e. This is a claim, which is “the object” in verification. In order for investors, partners, and other stakeholders to trust this number is true, they need assurance, which can be provided by a specific kind of conformity assessment body – a verification body. The verification body assesses the claim and produces a statement to confirm it, to a certain level of assurance (eg. limited or reasonable). In this case, the standard used by the auditor to assess the declared value could be ISO 14083. This is an example of a verification engagement.

But what about validation: is it the same thing? Verification and validation both convey assurance of reliability of information declared in claims. They are distinguished according to the timeline of the assessed claim:   Verification applies to claims that have already occurred or results that have already been obtained (confirmation of truthfulness).   Validation applies to claims regarding an intended future use or projected outcome (confirmation of plausibility).   So, if this company had also committed to zero emissions by 2050, and requested conformity assessment services for this claim, that would be a validation engagement.      And what about verification bodies such as the third party engaged by our example airline? Do they have to comply with rules for doing their assurance work? Yes, and there are several alternative rules they follow. And are they evaluated too? Yes, some of them are.