In an Innovations Fund supported project from September 2023 to February 2024, Marin Trust carried out a comprehensive impact evaluation to assess whether their activities lead to improved or protected environmental parameters. It focused on the synergies, challenges and factors driving improvement between MarinTrust-certified and MarinTrust Improver Programme factories.

This document presents the set of 15 indicators, the rationale for their selection, definitions, methodological notes, and main references for each indicator. It also includes the learnings from pilot testing the indicators in different countries and settings.

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.

This document outlines the desktop research conducted at the start of the project and explains the process how the Delta Framework was developed.

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. 

ISEAL Credibility Principles revision: Summary of feedback on V.1.1

This paper explores how Voluntary Sustainability Initiatives (VSIs) for the mining sector can be used to demonstrate that companies have appropriate due diligence systems and processes in place, to ensure that due diligence has been carried out, and to verify due diligence. While VSIs and related verification processes are not a substitute for rule of law and the role of government in establishing requirements and oversight, they can serve as a complementary tool for due diligence.

This briefing paper complements ISEAL’s Recommendations, released in November 2022, which focus on two main areas of legislative reform for the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD):

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 learnings from projects by ISEAL and its members, where metrics alignment and data sharing were key.

This form should be completed by sustainability standards and similar systems to apply for ISEAL Community membership.

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

There is wide recognition that the ongoing pandemic has had a profound impact on women across all dimensions of economic and social activity. From shifting gender roles within the household to effects on women’s active role in the economy and the real health and well-being effects of the pandemic, there is a growing concern that women are ‘losing out’ severely. From the standpoint of sustainability standards and systems, the pandemic has opened up the opportunity to review many streams of work, including how they conduct their assurance activities.

This methodology aims to support national commodity associations and other relevant public bodies to aggregate producer-level data using the Delta indicators to assess and report on the sustainability performance of the commodity’s production at country level.

This document discusses core concepts, such as consent and rights, that underpin governance of data use and sharing. It proposes general principles and steps for a reasoned and documented approach to data rights, control and sharing for the ISEAL community. The purpose of this guidance is to help sustainability systems: 1) establish certified entities’ rights to data related to certified activities; and 2) responsibly use and share those data.

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).

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.

This report offers lessons learned on how interoperability of sustainability standards in the metals, minerals and metals (MMM) sectors can help standards systems in other sectors. In particular, it explores how MMM, forestry and agriculture standards can enhance collaboration and improve sustainability impacts through interoperability.