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.

Sustainability systems are market-based tools designed to address the most pressing social and environmental challenges of our time. They define responsible practices, assess the implementation of these practices, and measure and communicate results. Sustainability systems are used in most sectors worldwide to improve social and environmental performance. Download this one page, full description of a sustainability system.

This document sets out what our Code Compliant status recognises for our Community Members and outlines the structure of the ISEAL membership.

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. 

This 2017 report by WWF and ISEAL explores how businesses can use credible voluntary sustainability standards to contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The last two decades have seen big changes. But what further changes do we need to see for sustainability systems to have an even greater impact in the years ahead?

Patrick Mallet, Innovations Director at ISEAL, and Akiva Fishman, Senior Program Officer at World Wildlife Fund, discuss what credible assurance at a landscape level looks like.