Jurisdictional Monitoring and Claims

Tackling sustainability at scale

As the rates of climate change, deforestation and biodiversity loss continue to increase, new approaches are emerging to address these sustainability challenges at scale. These landscape and jurisdictional approaches recognise that issues like deforestation, habitat conversion, land rights and rural development are often best addressed across whole landscapes or jurisdictions. They also bring together all stakeholders across value chains to work towards common goals over time.

Supporting credible monitoring and claims

To meet their potential, jurisdictional and landscape initiatives need to be able to demonstrate that they are delivering. To facilitate this, ISEAL aims to ensure that sustainability claims made by jurisdictions, landscape initiatives, and the companies that source from or support them, are credible.

Through 2022 - 2024, ISEAL is convening a community of landscape and jurisdictional practitioners to produce a series of joint position papers and a company roadmap that aims to provide companies and organisations that support them with accessible and consistent guidance for effective investment and action in landscape and jurisdictions. The first position paper on what constitutes a company landscape investment or action was launched in December 2022 and the second on making effective company claims about landscape investments and actions in March 2023. The third and penultimate position paper, launched in August 2023, sets initial guidelines for what claims companies can make about their contributions to landscape performance outcomes. The final paper in the series was launched in early 2024 and focuses on company responsibilities for supporting credible landscape monitoring.

Building on the position papers, in late 2024 the community of landscape and jurisdictional practitioners agreed the core criteria and sub-criteria for mature landscape initiatives which are presented alongside the key use cases for the criteria.

A set of measurement papers produced between 2023 - 2024 support landscape and jurisdictional practitioners to align around foundational measurement approaches and share learning on the practicalities of measurement at a landscape and jurisdictional scale.

ISEAL has developed a set of guiding practices to steer how companies can support and invest in landscape and jurisdictional approaches and claim their contributions in a transparent and credible manner. A consultation was held October - December 2021 with Version 1.0 launched in March 2022.

The guidance complements and builds on the ‘Making Credible Jurisdictional Claims’ good practice guide, originally published in 2020 and updated in March 2022. This broader guidance sets out a range of concepts and practices for jurisdictional initiatives and the companies that source from them to develop robust, transparent and impartial means to monitor, verify and communicate progress.

A dynamic and active space

A number of jurisdictional initiatives have already developed frameworks that allow them to monitor and verify operational and performance outcomes. Organisations like Indonesia-based LTKL and Brazil-based PCI are leading the way in developing place-based solutions that are situated in the local context. Initiatives like LandScale, IDH's PPI Compacts and SourceUp, the SAN Blueprint, and the Commodities/Jurisdictions Approach represent assessment frameworks that can be adapted and applied across jurisdictions, and that can link sustainable production areas to markets. We are working closely with these initiatives to ensure our guidance builds on existing good practice, and both complements and supports their efforts.

A range of resources has also been developed by ISEAL and other thought leaders in recent years to support private sector action in jurisdictional initiatives. Many of these can be found through the Tropical Forest Alliance / Jurisdictional Action Network Resource Hub.

With the support of:

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