Jason LaChappelle, ISEAL Policy Team
Because sustainability standards developed as non-state-led sustainability tools, they are often thought of in isolation of government policies. In reality standards and regulations are not mutually exclusive. In fact the growing activity at the voluntary-regulatory interface would suggest that effective government use of sustainability standards can support both public policy objectives and the long-term demand for certification
On the Public Day of ISEAL’s annual conference, examples from the biofuels sector were used to showcase the multiple ways that regulators and standards systems interact. The objective of the session was to ask how to make it easier for governments to champion credible standards in their policies and strategies.
Renewable energy is a sustainability area where there is a significant level of government intervention, which makes biofuels an excellent test case for analysing the intersection of standards and regulations.
Government an important partner in scaling up
The Roundtable on Sustainable Biofuels (RSB) aims to promote the global standard for socially, environmentally and economically sustainable production, conversion and use of biomass. RSB principles and criteria cover topics such as food security, ecosystem services and land rights. While public agencies and multilateral organisations do not have voting privileges in RSB’s chamber system, Alwin Kopse, Executive Secretary of RSB, emphasised how integral governments are a stakeholder for differentiating better biofuels from unsustainable pathways.
There are many reasons for engaging closely with governments on the development and implementation of the RSB standard, the overarching motive being that effective state recognition of the standard can amplify its uptake and sustainability impacts.
States are beginning to establish robust renewable energy policies and if there is alignment between standard content and government objectives, then there is opportunity for standards to be used as a framework for national legislation, as an indicator of compliance, or applied as part of due diligence processes. According to Kopse, the possibility of serving as a regulatory tool has strongly informed the work of the RSB.
Mexico using RSB as template for achieving sustainability objectives
Dr Alejandro Ríos Galván, provided the perspective of the Mexican government in its standards recognition process. Galván is heading Flight Plan, an initiative to develop a commercially viable sustainable biofuels aviation industry in Mexico. The programme is conducting an investigation into the feasibility of sustainable biofuels, including an analysis of the supply chain and the potential for enabling legal frameworks.
For this purpose, Mexico has found it extremely important to support the development of RSB because the experience of certification systems provides a credible blueprint for bringing verified sustainable biofuels onto the market.
The country has set a voluntary target for biofuels to cover 15 per cent of jet fuel supplies by 2015. Since Mexico will depend on imports to feed 85 per cent of its biofuels supply,Galván remarked that certification is a desirable mechanism for ensuring credibility and transparency in sustainable international trade.
Domestically, voluntary standards can also increase efficiency and limit bureaucracy between ministries, which are major reasons why RSB principles and criteria are being used as a template for the development of the Mexico’s own Sustainability Standard. This illustrates the complementarity between international and national standards: International standards can generate global consistency across states, but at the same time governments can ensure local applicability when using international standards as a basis for their own policies.
But national interpretation of international standards like RSB can also be problematic, an issue raised by an audience member who questioned the likelihood of a WTO dispute. Kopse replied that despite the international legitimacy afforded by ISEAL membership, inconsistent national interpretation of voluntary standards does create the risk of a WTO complaint against the country using the standard.
UK benchmarking uses standards as screen for EU regulatory compliance
The UK is one country that is actively interpreting the RSB standard as part of its Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation (RTFO), a government requirement for biofuels to account for 5 per cent of transport fuels by 2013. The aim of RTFO is to prepare the UK energy industry for the Renewable Energy Directive (RED), a European Union mandate legislating that 20 per cent of energy come from renewable sources.
Dr Keeley Bignal, Sustainability Technical Guidance Specialist with the Department of Transport, shared the UK’s experience as the first government to conduct a benchmarking process of biofuels standards, which included RSB as well as the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil and Bonsucro among others.
The benchmarking process compared a suite of standards against the RTFO meta-standard, which itself is a collection of sustainability indicators that businesses will need to comply with in order qualify under RED. The intent of the exercise was to identify “Qualifying Environmental and Social Standards” and encourage a greater proportion of UK companies to become certified in order to maximise their “RED-readiness.”
Government engagement drives improvement in standards
Generally governments engage with standards with the intention of driving them to provide more rigorous assurance of their sustainability principles and criteria. Both Kopse and Bignal agreed that it is more common for governments to help improve the quality and credibility of standards rather than to encourage standards to comprise their integrity.
While the results of the RTFO benchmarking process showed that no voluntary standards met the full requirements of the meta-standard, an open dialogue has enabled standards to consider the recommendations of regulators. For instance, the Department of Transport found that certification schemes did not adequately address GHG savings, a keystone element of RED. This has become a focal area of RSB as they have developed an online GHG calculator and other tools to ensure that biofuels operators can measure and report on GHG savings.
Accurate recognition essential for standards and governments
But for standards systems, well structured communication with regulators also ensures that certification is being accurately recognised and integrated into policy. Kopse acknowledged that a challenge of working with governments is their limited knowledge of standards systems and a lack of consistency in benchmarking rules.
Governments require a lot of information from standards systems and there is a mutual interest in striving for accuracy. As Bignal pointed out, standards do not want to be misrepresented, especially where standard content or objective was misunderstood by standards users. Likewise, the success of government regulation depends on how effectively standards have been positioned within the strategy.
An important point made by Kopse is that standards systems need to take a more prominent role in benchmarking exercises to ensure that comparison processes are balanced with the perspectives of the standards community. ISEAL’s leading work on the Standards Systems Comparison Tool aims to fill this gap by providing a high-level, sophisticated tool for making sound and credible comparisons between standards.
In conceptualising the Scaling Up Strategy, engagement with governments applies to every sustainability issue, region and sector in which the standards movement is resolving to increase its impact. As it is a cross-cutting theme, ISEAL can play a critical role in promoting an effective progression in how governments recognise standards.
To download resources from this and other sessions at the ISEAL Conference Public Day visit our conference resources page.