The IPM Coalition under the umbrella of the ISEAL Alliance created “Pesticides & Alternatives”. The multi-lingual tool will support pest control with less negative environmental and human impact. The APP is targeted for auditors, decision-makers of farms, fields and forests. The link below will take users to the Apple Store to download the app for free.

In 2016, nine ISEAL members came together to form the Integrated Pest Management (IPM) Coalition. The coalition aims to reduce and eventually eliminate the use of highly hazardous pesticides, and to promote more sustainable alternatives. It also aims to harmonise approaches to pesticides between ISEAL member standards.

Please use this form to submit comments and suggestions on sections of the revised ISEAL Chain of Custody Definitions and Models Guidance. Completed forms should be emailed to Josh Taylor, Traceability Manager – Josh@isealalliance.org by 11 January 2025.

This report presents the findings and recommendations from the Blueprint Project. Blueprint describes the sustainability status of municipalities with a combination of high-precision visual classification of land cover types, and interviews with a representative sample of local stakeholders to reflect the economic, social, and environmental reality on the ground. It illustrates sustainability challenges and flags opportunities from the perspective of the inhabitants of a territory.

This report reports on the pilot phase of the Landscape Assessment Framework in the context of the Sustainable Cocoa Landscapes project in San Martin, Peru. The social indicators that have been proposed by Max Havelaar / Flocert based on the prioritized social issues for the landscapes (see documents "social study of the landscapes" and "social issues in the Mariscal Caceres landscape") have been applied as a test in the landscape. The process followed for this pilot phase is summarized in paragraph 2, and the process of validation of the indicators is presented in paragraph 3.

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.

This document provides instruction to aid users in using the ODK tool. The function of the ODK tool within the Blueprint project has been to provide offline data collection capabilities and data that can be stored in SAN’s technology platform the iHub which provides a secure, agile, and scalable backend for the mobile app.

A matrix of indicators for use with farm owners and when using the ODK Mobile App, as part of the Blueprint Project. 

Assessing environmental and social sustainability at the landscape level poses significant challenges related to the availability of accurate cultural, economic, and ecological information. In this sector, decision-making must take this intersectional information into account to develop management strategies that enhance the sustainability of the territory, prevent detrimental actions to ecosystem services, and defend against poor socioeconomic management of a region.

In 2023, the Global Living Wage Coalition commissioned the Anker Research Institute and ISEAL to do a needs assessment aimed at gathering stakeholder views on the readiness to advance on living wages for tea workers in Assam and West Bengal. 

Between 29 September and 5 October 2021, Helvetas conducted a stakeholder consultation of the project "Sustainable Cocoa Landscapes in San Martin". The consultation was carried out through face-to-face workshops in the different districts of the province. This resulted in the prioritization of social issues to be taken forward by the project. 

This infographic provides a summary on boosting sustainability practice and performance at the landscape level, through Good Water Stewardship project. 

Experts from ISEAL, and ISEAL members discuss what our research is telling us about the reach, contribution and impacts of standards on smallholder farmers and what this means for future innovations and partnerships.

The paper provides insights on growth trends and geographic presence of seven ISEAL member schemes that are leading global agricultural standards across seven commodities. We focus on trends and presence in producing and exporting countries where these schemes are adopted, with a specific interest in presence in low and lower-income classified countries.

A compilation of the lessons learned from four pilot projects in remote auditing from Responsible Jewellery Council, LEAF Marque, Beter Cotton Initiative, and Fairtrade USA. LEAF Marque and the Responsible Jewellery Council looked at the extent to which remote auditing could provide an alternative to in-person on-site visits, while the two other pilot projects used a remote phone survey based on worker voice technology to carry out interviews with workers in factory settings (in the case of Fair Trade USA) and in an agricultural setting on cotton farms (Better Cotton Initiative – BCI).

In this report ISEAL offers insights from three baselines of evaluations that it commissioned in 2015 and were published in June 2016

Report produced for the ISEAL Alliance Innovations Fund project “Integrating new data to improve risk assessments and detection of forced labour vulnerability in agricultural supply chains”.

A Report produced for the ISEAL Alliance Innovations Fund project “Integrating new data to improve risk assessments and detection of forced labour vulnerability in agricultural supply chains”.

The ISEAL-funded research project Integrating new data to improve risk assessments and detection of forced labour in agricultural supply chains (2017 – 18) is an attempt to build the evidence base around monitoring and remediating forced labour in agricultural supply chains.

This report first examines how standards systems are being applied to landscapes and jurisdictions. It then explores factors that are important to the effective application of sustainability strategies at a landscape level and identifies opportunities to strengthen the role that standards systems can play in implementing those strategies.

Moving towards an outcome-based standard creates the opportunity for LEAF to communicate more closely on the impacts of implementing the LEAF Marque Standard, measuring outcomes directly rather than proxying them with practices.

In this webinar, the results at the mid-point of a 5-year mixed methods study that considers the impacts and perceptions of certification-linked sustainability programs and market access in smallholder coffee value chains in the southern regions of Sumatra, Indonesia are presented.

We are excited to launch the revision of the ISEAL Chain of Custody (CoC) Definitions and Models Guidance. The revision process will include:

In 2022, CGIAR's HER+ initiative researchers partnered with ISEAL to explore how sustainability systems are able to contribute to advancing gender equality and women’s empowerment. Gender is a crosscutting theme in ISEAL’s strategic priority to power solutions to sustainability challenges.

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.