Tackling gender inequalities is becoming increasingly important for voluntary sustainability standards (VSS) and similar systems to address. 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 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. 

ISEAL has developed a good practice guide to help ensure that sustainability claims made by jurisdictions, landscape initiatives, and the companies that source from or support them, are credible. The guidance covers the structural and performance claims a jurisdictional entity may wish to make, along with the supporting action claims of other related stakeholders.

The Smart Assurance project, supported by the ISEAL Innovations Fund (September 2023 to July 2024), developed and tested a new type of oversight process that combines the use of satellite data, analytical methods, and ground verification supported by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs or drones) with assessment practices to provide enhanced oversight both at scale and with a new level of granularity.