Understanding whether sustainability standards make a difference on the ground is an ongoing concern for sustainability standards and for the many businesses and governments that rely on them to operationalize sustainability in supply chains and landscapes.

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.

What is a sustainability standard? Video in Spanish.

Webinar on how to establish strong credible standards in Spanish.

This animated video introduces the concept of FPIC and the insights gained from the workshops we conducted with Indigenous Peoples' leaders in Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. Equitable Origin has conducted a 10 month research project to explore how voluntary sustainability standards can better verify and monitor Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) processes.

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.