This webinar presents the paper ‘Conservation Impacts of Voluntary Sustainability standards: How Has our Understanding of conservation impacts changed since the 2012 Publication of “Toward Sustainability: The Roles and Limitations of Certification”?’.

This 2022 CGIAR-ISEAL scoping study builds on an evaluation of gender mainstreaming in sustainability standards conducted with ISEAL Community Members in 2020. It provides an update on ISEAL Community Members' efforts on gender equality.

In general, in a territory the social actors work collaboratively, they themselves define the channels and mechanisms of participation in accordance with their cultural framework and the roles recognized for each one.

The last five years have seen a growing number of initiatives focused on increasing demand for sustainable palm oil in emerging economy markets. This report and case studies summarise key reflections and insights from an ISEAL-led project to understand strategies and activities adopted in key Asian countries to boost the demand for sustainable palm oil over the last five years.

There are different ways in which sustainability systems can operate at landscape level. The ATLA project was designed to explore some of the key considerations at play in these strategic decisions, such as where to focus efforts, the scale of time and resources needed, how to measure performance at landscape level, and what it means to work in partnership with existing multi-stakeholder initiatives. Two project pilots, in Turkey and Pakistan, provided practical insights for these strategic decisions in the case of Better Cotton.

This desk research is an output from the Delta Framework, an ISEAL Innovations Fund supported project that is developing a cross-commodity framework for sustainability monitoring and reporting.

This case study forms part of the Rainforest Alliance project Use of Risk Maps for Child and Forced Labour in Risk-Based Assurance Processes, supported by the ISEAL Innovations Fund. The project sought to test the prototypes of sectoral risk maps for child labor and forced labor in Kenya, Côte d’Ivoire, and Honduras.

This report looks at the issues facing small certified producers and their expectations and experiences of certification, and explores how standards can address producers’ needs and priorities.

This briefing note shares insights and learnings from a series of semi-structured interviews ISEAL conducted with fourteen leading, global companies engaged in living wage actions.

Learn how a partnership between the government of the world’s largest coffee producing state – Minas Gerais – and the world’s largest voluntary standard for coffee, UTZ Certified, enables producers access to high-value markets while scaling-up more sustainable production practices.

In this video, small producers report on the impact sustainability standards have had on their life. 

What is the role that standards systems play in changing the practices of certified entities? How effective are standards systems in driving change in practices over time? This webinar explores these questions and delves into the findings of a new research review conducted by the University of Oxford and 3Keel consultants.

In this webinar, Equitable Origin shares the insights gained and outputs generated from a ten month project funded by the ISEAL Innovations Fund to explore how FPIC processes could be better monitored and verified. The right to free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) is a key principle of international human rights law.

Juan Isaza, Program Manager, explains what the IPM Coalition is and how this initiative will accelerate the elimination of highly hazardous pesticide usage throughout the world.

This webinar gives an overview of the 'Boosting Sustainability Practice and Performance at the Landscape Level through Good Water Stewardship' project.

This webinar provided an opportunity for those working in the palm oil sector in Asia, including on the demand side, to hear about ongoing efforts in China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore that are strengthening demand for sustainable palm oil such as youth engagement, industry platforms, and company rankings.

The shift in recent years towards a more sustainable global economy has seen an increasing focus on how businesses address human rights and potential labour exploitation in their supply chains. Companies are now expected to go beyond public commitments, and face the task of operationalising human rights policies in a transparent fashion. Credible standards organisations have proven to be important tools to bridge the implementation gap of these policies, raising the question of how standards systems are equipped to identify forced labour and what happens when cases are detected.

This ISEAL Community webinar introduces the draft Verification of Jurisdictional Claims guide and the good practices that should underpin claims made about progress in jurisdictional initiatives. It touches on why jurisdictional verification is relevant for sustainability standards and potential synergies.

A working paper for the project “New data to detect forced labour in agriculture”.

ISEAL works to improve the credibility and impacts of sustainability standards and understanding impacts is an important strategic goal. This paper is the first attempt to draw on internal performance monitoring data of schemes and external research to analyse the reach and characteristics of smallholder farmers within ISEAL member agriculture schemes. This is the third in a series of collective reporting briefing papers researched by ISEAL as part of the ‘Demonstrating and Improving Poverty Impacts’ (DIPI) project. 

We often talk about system-level change to address root causes of poverty and imbalance of risk. This requires us to unite in different and creative ways. The Living Income Community of Practice motivates actors across sectors to help close the income gap, so that smallholders can earn a decent standard of living as a basic human right.