Climate, biodiversity and nature
Trustworthy and ambitious sustainability systems are increasingly offering new tools and applying innovative approaches to support businesses, governments and civil society with credible action on climate and nature. ISEAL supports innovation and builds understanding of good practice in this area.
We work with sustainability systems and actors in the climate and landscapes ecosystems on topics such as: credible claims; effective implementation of emerging legislation; data collection, sharing, and reporting; and innovative mechanisms for achieving environmental outcomes while supporting producer livelihoods.
We take a holistic approach to our work. Environmental outcomes cannot be divorced from livelihood outcomes, and we also recognise critical links between climate, biodiversity, water and deforestation outcomes. Sustainable resource management requires credible action at both the landscape level and the production site. Achieving global commitments will require coordinated and complementary action by regulatory and voluntary initiatives.
Global commitments on tackling the climate crisis and reversing the loss of nature give renewed impetus to regulatory and voluntary initiatives to tackle deforestation, reduce and report on GHG emissions, and protect biodiversity. Sustainability systems have long laid the foundations for action on these topics, translating aspirational concepts into practical standards and requirements that business can implement. Today, their efforts go well beyond certification and compliance assessment. Sustainability systems both complement and support emerging legislation.
From existing evidence of the impacts of sustainability systems on these environmental outcomes, we know that sustainability standards have great potential to shape the businesses and production practices.
- They have reached impressive scale in many commodities, exceeding the reach of many other supply chain approaches.
- Certified entities are more likely to adopt and retain better practices and, although audits are not flawless, they help drive these better practices and avoid slippage into bad practices, especially in countries with weak national regulatory frameworks in place (Petrokofsky and Jennings 2018).
- A recent review of sustainability systems and alternative approaches concluded that voluntary standards systems met more criteria for successfully tackling deforestation than regulatory approaches, due diligence regulations, public-private partnerships or landscape approaches (Ingram, Behagel, Mammadova, and Verschuur 2020).
At the same time, we know that supply chain-based approaches and market-based tools have some limitations in tackling landscape or watershed level challenges like deforestation or water management. For example, sustainability standards are generally implemented in areas chosen by companies rather than in the areas of most deforestation risk, and if standards are focused on improving sustainable practices at the site or enterprise level those continuing with ‘bad’ practice can move to other locations. Many sustainability systems are adopting new innovative approaches and roles in order to better address these challenges.
Research also tells us that context matters: sustainability standards are driving important conservation outcomes in a variety of contexts, while having less success in others (Komives et al, 2018). The strength of local legislation and the practices of supply chain leaders are two of the factors that affect outcomes from certification.
ISEAL encourages sustainability systems to be transparent about their contribution and impacts, and we support independent researchers working to understand the impacts of sustainability systems. As a result, we know more about where standards and certification works well and less well, but much less about the effectiveness of other approaches.
Visit evidensia.eco for a comprehensive picture of available evidence.
