Flagship resources from the ISEAL Innovations Fund and Programme

Flagship resources from the ISEAL Innovations Fund and Programme

Since 2016, the ISEAL Innovations Fund and Programme has been leading new research and actively convening and conducting extensive global consultations with practitioners, researchers, businesses and government authorities to understand the landscape in which sustainability systems operate.

Collectively we have helped define good practices and identified entry points to equip sustainability systems with the knowledge and expertise they need to respond to emerging opportunities and drive systemic change. The Innovations Fund and Programme has produced a series of reports to advance thinking in key areas. Below is a snapshot of some of these flagship reports.

This 2017 report by Aidenvironment and commissioned by ISEAL, reviews the business benefits that using sustainability standards can deliver to various business entities along the length of the supply chain. It also aims to gain understanding on how benefits materialise and the limitations to the delivery of such benefits.
This research aims to contribute evidence of the Impacts of Voluntary Sustainability Standards as well as provide a working definition for the concept of systemic impacts.
This report first examines how standards systems are being applied to landscapes and jurisdictions. It then explores factors that are important to the effective application of sustainability strategies at a landscape level and identifies opportunities to strengthen the role that standards systems can play in implementing those strategies.
For companies working to improve sustainability performance within their supply chains, engaging in landscape and jurisdictional approaches is a way to take action at scale. This set of guiding practices for effective company actions in landscapes and jurisdictions aims to support companies taking this step.
ISEAL has developed a good practice guide to help ensure that sustainability claims made by jurisdictions, landscape initiatives, and the companies that source from or support them, are credible. The guidance covers the structural and performance claims a jurisdictional entity may wish to make, along with the supporting action claims of other related stakeholders.
Global sustainability challenges are complex problems and determining the best strategies to bring about lasting improvements in sustainability performance remains a core challenge for sustainability systems. Many are increasingly experimenting with a wide range of strategies to reach their sustainability goals. However, the effectiveness of these strategies is highly dependent on the context in which they are applied. 
The context in which sustainability systems operate significantly influences the scale, depth and durability of their impacts. This is an important consideration when designing new strategies to improve sustainability performance. To provide support in this area, we have developed the following resources:
This document discusses core concepts, such as consent and rights, that underpin governance of data use and sharing. It proposes general principles and steps for a reasoned and documented approach to data rights, control and sharing for the ISEAL community. The purpose of this guidance is to help sustainability systems: 1) establish certified entities’ rights to data related to certified activities; and 2) responsibly use and share those data.
This document provides practical guidance for sustainability systems to support them in generating valuable and actionable insights from data. Utilizing concepts in data science, it is intended for sustainability systems seeking to maximise the value of their data, combine data sources, and enable improved data-driven decision making procedures.
This guidance equips sustainability standards with practical tips on how they can make their impact claims more meaningful and effective with confidence and accuracy.
This document summarises the results of a pilot project coordinated by ISEAL to face the challenge of communicating the impacts of standards. It also reflects on the value of this pilot as a rich learning experience for all the individuals involved.
This resource reviews the benefits and challenges of metrics alignment and data sharing for organisations, and provides a roadmap and considerations to help think through undertaking them. The guidance builds on learning's from a number of ISEAL, and ISEAL member projects that either focused on metrics alignment and or data sharing as an ultimate goal, or where metrics alignment and or data sharing were key activities within the project.
Guidelines, which have been prepared to serve as the basis for discussion on standardized procedures and protocols for the collection and management of certificate location data with the goal that these data will eventually become part of an ISEAL member Certification Atlas (CA).
This report summarises an assessment of a range of leading metrics that can be used to credibly measure and report on performance over time and across multiple spatial scales. The research focuses on six critical sustainability issues: deforestation, biodiversity, water use, forced labour, poverty, and Greenhouse Gas emissions.
Discussion paper and webinar on landscape and jurisdictional assurance and claims.
The COVID-19 pandemic severely impacted the ability of many sustainability systems to perform on-site audits. Many have had to implement new policies and adapt to new ways of working. In many ways, this forced many sustainability systems to rapidly innovate during the pandemic, by embracing novel technologies and piloting new approaches to assess sites remotely.