Countries who have suffered a high level of severe fatality incidents through fire events or those with naturally occurring fires, such as the forest fires of Australia, are often the leaders of fire protection, prevention and management through necessity, and on a smaller scale, those organisations or nations who have suffered great human loss or industrial disaster due to fire breakout are the first to look at the lessons learned from the event, and put in place new legislation to ensure that a repeat of the incident cannot happen ever again. In this way, Fire Safety Management has evolved and still evolves in a multitude of ways every day throughout the world, and the learning process will never end. International Bodies and the part they play in Standardisation On an International level, managing fire safety is an extremely complex business as most nations manage their fire legislation at local level, for example, in the US each of its 52 states creates and directs their own legislation, and fire safety standards don't come from Washington DC, but in the main from the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), which coordinates American standards across other nations globally. The US is also seen as being the world leader in fire protection systems. Likewise, in the UK, although legislation comes from Government, the way the law is enforced differs slightly across each individual Fire Authority, which means not all legislation is managed consistently and it is open to local interpretation. This works until the outcome of a fire is severe, in which case the local interpretation is often looked at in the court process and can result in Fire Authorities being prosecuted due to poor judgement and management of the legislative requirements. In other parts of the world, namely Europe that has over 40 individual countries, there is specific regulation within each country that has no bearing on member countries at all. However, European standardisation does exist in part, led by the International Standards Organization (ISO), and these encompass such as the British Standards (BS), the Spanish Asociación Española de Normalización y Certificación (AENOR), and German Deutsches Intitut fur Normung (DIN). The ISO brings together over 150 countries and their respective legislation, standards, products, and services (in a similar way to the American model), and the combined result is often legislation that goes beyond that of each individual member country. Recent years have seen European led initiatives, with support from the European Commission and the EU becoming accepted as excellent fire safety practice and, as such, have begun to be taken seriously and not seen as conflicting with existing compliance requirements. One very visible initiative was the European classification system for fire extinguishers for all European countries, to avoid confusion for those organisations and civilians who visit and trade in more than one European country. Australia is seen as a world leader in terms of Fire Safety and together with New Zealand. Australia has the most extensive legislation and standards for fire safety, protection, and systems installation. Asia is in the main led by Japan, with China and other countries such as the Philippines beginning to make huge and positive changes to their fire safety management practices following events of fire occurring. Japan however leads the field regarding fire safety regulations. In terms of other parts of the world such as Africa, which is largely seen as being a continent of developing countries, fire safety is managed very differently between each individual country, such as the Republic of South Africa having
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