Bonsucro and Responsible Jewellery Council engaged Business & Human Rights consultancy twentyfifty to conduct a research project into Grievance Mechanisms within Voluntary Sustainability Standards (VSS). The research investigated how grievance mechanisms have been set up and how grievances are managed and remediated within their memberships.

Tackling gender inequalities is becoming increasingly important for voluntary sustainability standards and similar systems to address. More and more, sustainability systems are looking to integrate gender into their standards and the management of their organisations. Sustainability systems that are not gender-responsive can result in unnecessary health and safety risks for women and girls, and lead to unequal impacts and unintended consequences.

This guidance document provides guidance for sustainability systems looking to collect or improve the collection of polygon location data. It was developed with the support of experts and ISEAL members with advanced experience, and includes a variety of different options and technologies.

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.  

This methodology aims to support national commodity associations and other relevant public bodies to aggregate producer-level data using the Delta indicators to assess and report on the sustainability performance of the commodity’s production at country level.

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).

Bonsucro and Responsible Jewellery Council engaged Business & Human Rights consultancy twentyfifty Ltd to conduct a research project on learning and good practice from the experience of ISEAL Community Members in implementing Human Rights Due Diligence (HRDD) in line with the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs). This briefing note is intended to give a summary of the key findings from this.

The Impact Alliance is a voluntary collaboration between sustainability initiatives sharing similar goals to provide oversight of and support in the development, maintenance, promotion and claiming of Impact Incentives and Impact Partnerships. The purpose of this policy is to outline the Impact Alliance’s governance structure and mechanisms and can be made available to interested parties upon request.

This document outlines the approach taken by the LIA Impact Partnership Pilot project, exploring Impact Partnership Incentives. While Impact Incentives work in a similar way to existing book & claim systems by rewarding already certified producers, Impact Partnership Incentives allow brands and retailers to support on-the-ground Program Partners to help producers transition towards best practices and certification.

The Impact Alliance project was designed to test the feasibility of “Impact Incentives” and “Impact Partnership Incentives” as innovative market-driven working models to scale and improve sustainability performance at landscape levels. The aim was to have a validated model that can be scaled up and offered for use with other commodities and other ISEAL standards, becoming an important sustainability impact accelerator for the sourcing areas of a growing number of industries. This document provides lessons learnt and insights gained over the course of the project. 

This guidance equips sustainability standards with practical tips on how they can make their impact claims more meaningful and effective with confidence and accuracy.

Download the notes from the Inclusion & empowerment breakout session at the ISEAL Global Sustainability Symposium 2024.

ISEAL Community Members can claim to be ISEAL Code Compliant only when they have demonstrated adherence to the baseline and improvement criteria of each of ISEAL’s Codes of Good Practice in accordance with the processes and definitions in this procedure.

This document presents the performance metrics and data sources included in the Hybrid Community-based Monitoring System (HCMS) that was built by the Tech4Communities project in Ghana, using the LandScale assessment framework. 

This roadmap is developed to provide a pathway for all members of the IWSN to achieve the vision and mission of the network which has been aligned with the vision and mission of AWS Global Strategy. The roadmap acts as work program of IWSN which is set in 3 years timeline. The roadmap will help to: Provide clear result framework for IWSN Provide SMART milestones for IWSN

This infographic illustrates the research report authored by AidEnvironment and commissioned by ISEAL. The report is a refresher of the 2016 review and synthesis of literature and evidence of the business benefits of adopting sustainability standards. In total 40 credible source research documents, covering seven sectors were reviewed.

SCOPE is a geo-design tool that enables users to assess multiple outcomes related to commodity production and alternative policies including total production, water availability, water quality, greenhouse gas emissions, and land conversion. The tool allows for examining on-farm policy compliance and explore outcomes at local to landscape levels. This document presents how SCOPE can provide important information to certification stakeholders on how an area could perform against a standard (or is performing against a standard) at the local, landscape, or jurisdictional level.

The M3 Partnership Integrated Assessment Protocol (M3 IAP) is a tool designed to allow mine sites to be assessed against multiple site-level standards in a single audit, supporting identification of alignment across standards, and promoting demonstration of conformity with multiple standards with greater efficiency and reduced cost. This document describes the M3 IAP.

This Guidance document has been developed to facilitate the use of the Integrated Assessment Protocol (IAP). This macro-enabled Excel Workbook was created to assist the Mining Organization and Operation with an integrated approach to assessing conformity to select responsible mining initiatives. This workbook includes a combined protocol that represents the following standards: Towards Sustainable Mining (TSM) Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance (IRMA) Responsible Jewelry Council (RJC)

The Mining, Minerals, and Metals Partnership (M3 Partnership) is a collaboration of the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance (IRMA), Responsible Jewellery Council (RJC), ResponsibleSteel, and Towards Sustainable Mining (TSM). The M3 Partnership, made possible by the ISEAL Innovations Fund with support by the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs, aims to identify opportunities for alignment and collective action to drive improvement in social and environmental performance.

This publication was prepared for the M3 Partnership to facilitate integrated assessment to their respective standards and assurance frameworks.

This document includes considerations and a set of guiding questions designed to support the inclusion of the indicators in the Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) systems of Voluntary Sustainability Standards (VSS) and other organisations.

Many sustainability systems are testing and implementing different strategies to improve their sustainability performance and to  become more effective in tackling some of the world's most pressing issues. It is becoming clear that there is added value in adopting strategies that address the wider system. These systemic strategies can help organisations have a lasting impact within their context.

This methodology aims to support national commodity associations and other relevant public bodies to aggregate producer-level data using the Delta indicators to assess and report on the sustainability performance of the commodity’s production at country level.

Sustainability systems represent and support complex supply chains, with a wide variety of commodities, producers and geographies included. Emissions reporting is a complex and fast-moving space. Thus, these systems and their communities may face challenges keeping pace with developments and developing consistent and appropriate good practices that can benefit their communities and climate security.