Small-scale producers play a vital role in sustainable production and land use — but too often, they lack the resources and economic resilience needed to adopt more sustainable practices.This case study highlights practical approaches that are helping bridge this gap by creating incentives that bring climate, environmental and social benefits, including premiums, incentives and recognising and rewarding community stewardship.Part of a series exploring promising approaches for enabling small-scale producer market access and shifts to sustainable production:

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.

This guidance document offers suggestions as input for consideration for the recent EUDR guidelines on the use of certification. ISEAL has built a broad-based consensus around what constitutes credible operating practices for sustainability certification schemes. Our Code of Good Practice captures this consensus in a publicly available normative document against which all ISEAL Code compliant members have been evaluated.

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 case study highlights how credible voluntary sustainability standards (VSS) support palm oil companies with regulatory requirements such as the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR). Featuring the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), it explores how VSS enable traceability, ensure legal production, and promote smallholder inclusion - helping businesses build deforestation-and conversion-free (DCF) supply chains that go beyond compliance.

This document summarises the learning from Rainforest Alliance's Hybrid Community-Based Monitoring pilot project. The goal of this 3-year project was to design and develop a Hybrid Community-based Monitoring System (HCMS) that combines GPS and remote sensing with on-the-ground data from the key landscape stakeholders for data management and reporting at a landscape level.

The Smart Assurance project supported by the ISEAL Innovations Fund until 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.

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.

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

This is a standardised metadata set that provides a common code for search and discovery to improve the flow of sustainability information.

This technical paper identifies opportunities for further Guidance that we believe will strengthen an effective implementation of EUDR. ISEAL has been engaging closely with sustainability systems to understand how they are aligning and adapting in response to EUDR. In the process of adapting, sustainability systems have identified outstanding ambiguities in the Regulation and published FAQs (v1.2) which may hinder effective and consistent implementation of EUDR by operators and traders. Our paper identifies three opportunities for further guidance:

This user manual has been created as part of the Tech4Communities: Hybrid Community-based Monitoring system (HCMS) project. The project seeks to create a hybrid “remote” and “on the ground” monitoring and evaluation programme to support data gathering and management at a landscape level.

This blog outlines a set of key messages on due diligence and standards systems in the context of TFA letter to the European Commission.

Chain of custody (CoC) and traceability are big news right now. But are we all speaking the same language? We’re updating our CoC models and definitions guidance and we would value your input. Our public consultation is now open.

With a shift towards outcome-focused sustainability standards and measurement, ISEAL commissioned 3Keel to review different metrics for monitoring sustainability performance.

ISEAL has produced a package of tools and guidance on the power of polygon data and how sustainability systems can collect it.