Six years ago, ISEAL published a comprehensive review and synthesis of existing literature and evidence of the business benefits of using sustainability standards.

The ISEAL Innovations Fund and Programme was launched in 2016 to create an enabling environment for innovation, new ideas and strategies to scale the impact, effectiveness, efficiency and inclusiveness of sustainability systems. This learning brief captures some of the key early lessons learned so far.

The only way to solve the sustainability challenges that we face today – from deforestation to biodiversity loss to inequality and poverty – is through greater collaboration, collective action, and innovation. We believe that sustainability systems are an important part of this solution by driving the sustainable transformation of complex commodity sectors and global supply chains. But to remain effective and add value, sustainability systems need to constantly push boundaries.

For companies working to improve sustainability performance within their supply chains, engaging in landscape and jurisdictional approaches is a way to take action at scale. This set of guiding practices for effective company actions in landscapes and jurisdictions aims to support companies taking this step.

On 17 November 2021, the European Commission published its Proposal for a Regulation on Deforestation-free Products (hereafter “the Proposal”). This position paper outlines how ISEAL believes this draft legislation should be adjusted to have a deeper impact on preventing deforestation.

ISEAL works to improve the credibility and impacts of sustainability standards and understanding impacts is an important strategic goal. This paper is the first attempt to draw on internal performance monitoring data of schemes and external research to analyse the reach and characteristics of smallholder farmers within ISEAL member agriculture schemes. This is the third in a series of collective reporting briefing papers researched by ISEAL as part of the ‘Demonstrating and Improving Poverty Impacts’ (DIPI) project. 

This is a research report published by ISEAL and authored by Dr Emma Wilson. The report was developed as part of a collaboration between ISEAL and GIZ to support the work of sustainability standards in the metals, mining and minerals sector.

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.

This report summarises an assessment of a range of leading metrics that can be used to credibly measure and report on performance over time and across multiple spatial scales. The research focuses on six critical sustainability issues: deforestation, biodiversity, water use, forced labour, poverty, and Greenhouse Gas emissions.

Report on ISEAL member collaboration on shared impact reporting.

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.

This report looks at the issues facing small certified producers and their expectations and experiences of certification, and explores how standards can address producers’ needs and priorities.

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

This resource reviews the benefits and challenges of metrics alignment and data sharing for organisations, and provides a roadmap and considerations to help think through undertaking them. The guidance builds on learning's from a number of ISEAL, and ISEAL member projects that either focused on metrics alignment and or data sharing as an ultimate goal, or where metrics alignment and or data sharing were key activities within the project.

This baseline report presents the initial stage of a research project with the overarching goal to examine the impact on farmer livelihoods and poverty alleviation within Indonesian coffee-growing communities as a result of processes of verification or certification against different sustainability standards. These standards include the Common Code for the Coffee Community (4C) Code of Conduct, the Sustainable Agriculture Network/ Rainforest Alliance (SAN/RA) standard, and Utz Certification.

This report presents the findings of a three-year study, funded by ISEAL, of the early impacts of the Better Cotton Initiative on smallholder cotton producers in Kurnool District, Andhra Pradesh, India.

In this podcast, Jeffrey Neilson from the University of Sydney discusses the research report on the Evaluation of the Impacts of Sustainability Standards on Smallholder Coffee Farmers in Southern Sumatra, Indonesia published in 2019.

This report presents the results of a research project with the overarching goal to examine the impact on farmer livelihoods and poverty alleviation within Indonesian coffee-growing communities as a result of processes of certification against different sustainability standards. These standards include the Common Code for the Coffee Community (4C) and the Sustainable Agriculture Network/ Rainforest Alliance (SAN/RA) standard.

This report provides an endline status of the ISEAL-BSR project ‘Improving data and impact measurement for women in supply chains project’, which aimed to support standards in mainstreaming gender equality within their strategy, tools and systems.

Discussion paper and webinar on landscape and jurisdictional assurance and claims.