As part of its 2030 Strategy, Better Cotton has committed to strengthen impacts at farm level across the countries where it works and is currently setting ambitious global targets in key impact areas. In parallel, Better Cotton is exploring whether a landscape approach can deliver better impacts and efficiencies, to facilitate an evaluation of the potential of landscape approaches in the context of the BCSS, Better Cotton developed the Adaptation to Landscape Approach (ATLA) project.

The Modelling a Path to More Sustainable Landscapes project is a three-year effort to spatially analyze the baseline risk of commodity production and the role of sustainability policies to mitigate those risks. This document is for people interested in increasing the value and integrity of data and in assessing the potential impacts of policy decisions in terms of agriculture production and environmental outcomes.

The Modelling a Path to More Sustainable Landscapes project is a three-year effort to spatially analyse the baseline risk of commodity production and the role of sustainability policies to mitigate those risks. This document is for people interested in increasing the value and integrity of data and in assessing the potential impacts of policy decisions in terms of agriculture production and environmental outcomes.

The Modelling a Path to More Sustainable Landscapes project is a three-year effort to spatially analyse the baseline risk of commodity production and the role of sustainability policies to mitigate those risks.  This document is for people interested in increasing the value and integrity of data and in assessing the potential impacts of policy decisions in terms of agriculture production and environmental outcomes.

In 2019, the ISEAL Innovations Fund awarded a grant to Bonsucro to collaboratively develop and test methodologies to help financial service providers improve how they assess their agricultural clients’ sustainability performance, to enable access to better financing opportunities for farmers who produce sustainably. Project partners included the Better Cotton Initiative, and the Alliance for Water Stewardship (AWS).

The Impact Alliance is a voluntary collaboration between sustainability initiatives sharing similar goals to provide oversight of and support in the development, maintenance, promotion and claiming of Impact Incentives and Impact Partnerships. The purpose of this policy is to outline the Impact Alliance’s governance structure and mechanisms and can be made available to interested parties upon request.

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. 

SCOPE is a geo-design tool that enables users to assess multiple outcomes related to commodity production and alternative policies including total production, water availability, water quality, greenhouse gas emissions, and land conversion. The tool allows for examining on-farm policy compliance and explore outcomes at local to landscape levels. This document presents how SCOPE can provide important information to certification stakeholders on how an area could perform against a standard (or is performing against a standard) at the local, landscape, or jurisdictional level.

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.

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

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).

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.

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.

There are different ways in which sustainability systems can operate at landscape level. The ATLA project was designed to explore some of the key considerations at play in these strategic decisions, such as where to focus efforts, the scale of time and resources needed, how to measure performance at landscape level, and what it means to work in partnership with existing multi-stakeholder initiatives. Two project pilots, in Turkey and Pakistan, provided practical insights for these strategic decisions in the case of Better Cotton.

Juan Isaza, Program Manager, explains what the IPM Coalition is and how this initiative will accelerate the elimination of highly hazardous pesticide usage throughout the world.

A working paper for the project “New data to detect forced labour in agriculture”.