This report highlights lessons from pilot projects  across five supply chains in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific between 2024 and 2025, and cover sugar, cocoa, cotton and flowers. It captures Fairtrade’s approach, key lessons learned, and practical considerations, when Fairtrade facilitated direct dialogue between companies and farmers/workers. It also offers practical guidance for businesses and third-party facilitators. It is aimed at companies and (potential) facilitators of meaningful rightsholder dialogue.

From mid-2022 – mid-2024, ISEAL led a stream of work focused on Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL) for landscape and jurisdictional approaches. As part of this endeavour, we committed to supporting three sustainability systems and related organisations through pilot project funding. The goal was to explore the practicalities of measuring landscape and jurisdictional level performance improvement to tackle sustainability issues at scale, with a particular focus on biodiversity and nature, human well-being, and human rights.

A study to identify the prospect on incentive design for the uptake of water stewardship in Indonesia. The report looks at the existing government and financial sector landscape, as well as some best practices of financing mechanisms and incentives in the region and globally. A set of high-level recommendations are provided to support government and financial institutions in Indonesia to drive more incentive for good water stewardship uptake in Indonesia.

This report outlines an approach for producing land-cover maps at different cartographic scales, aiming to facilitate analysis, and ultimately evaluate which scale and method combinations offer the best balance between precision of data generated and resources invested.

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 case study is part of a series that looks at how credible VSS are responding to one of the most important legislative developments: the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), which aims to prevent products associated with deforestation from being sold on the EU market. Featuring Rainforest Alliance and Fairtrade International, it explores how credible VSS drive not only compliance but also meaningful transformation across the cocoa sector.

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 case study looks at how credible voluntary sustainability standards (VSS) are responding to one of the most important legislative developments: the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), which aims to prevent products associated with deforestation from being sold on the EU market. Featuring the Round Table on Responsible Soy (RTRS) and ProTerra,  it explores how credible VSS drive not only compliance but also meaningful transformation across the soy sector.

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. 

This document is a short ‘start here’ level introduction for buyers of certified commodities as users, stakeholders, participants and license holders of ISEAL member schemes or other sustainability systems.

This document is a short ‘start here’ level introduction for Certificate Holders and potential applicants for certification with ISEAL member schemes or other sustainability systems that have or are commencing on a process to align their certification of commodities and chains of custody models with emissions reporting good practices.

This document is a short ‘start here’ level introduction for Oversight and Assurance Providers to ISEAL member schemes or other sustainability systems that have or are commencing on a process to align their certification of commodities and chains of custody models with emissions reporting good practices.

This document is a short ‘start here’ level introduction for ISEAL member schemes or other sustainability systems who have commenced or are considering commencing on a process to align their certification of commodities and chains of custody models with emissions reporting good practices.

ISEAL engaged consultancy ANC Ltd to understand the strategic implications of sustainability reporting for VSS. To date, the opportunities for mutual benefit from collaboration between sustainability reporting frameworks and VSS were underexplored and underdeveloped.This summary report details the strategic pathways and implications of deeper collaboration between VSS and sustainability reporting frameworks for bigger sustainability impacts.

An introduction to ISEAL’s Finance Committee, which was established in 2006 to oversee all issues related to the financial management of ISEAL. The Committee reviews for example ISEAL’s quarterly accounts, annual budgets and other issues related to ISEAL’s financial reporting and performance.

An introduction to the Membership Committee, a permanent committee of the ISEAL Board of Directors that is responsible primarily for forming recommendations on new membership applications, deciding on member disputes that may arise as a result of an independent evaluation of Code Compliance, and deciding on appeals decisions of the Secretariat not to recommend ISEAL Community Member status or to suspend or withdraw Code Compliant status.

An introduction to ISEAL’s Technical Committee. The Technical Committee is a permanent sub-committee of the ISEAL Board that is responsible primarily for technical oversight of the ISEAL Codes of Good Practice and other Credibility Tools.

The ISEAL Innovations Fund launched a call in March 2023 for Community Members to submit expressions of interest for project ideas responding to opportunities for innovation. The types of grants available in this round were:

This report assesses leading metrics for measuring and reporting performance over time and across multiple spatial scales. It examines six critical sustainability issues: deforestation, biodiversity, water use, forced labour, poverty, and greenhouse gas emissions. The research supports sustainability systems in making data-driven outcome claims and provides insight into evaluating metric suitability. The report focuses on applicability of metrics and data sources, best practices, and associated limitations and trade-offs.

In recent years, we’ve seen a growing interest from sustainability systems in tackling gender inequalities through their schemes. A 2022 ISEAL-CGIAR Gender Equality Initiative scoping study tried to understand how some of ISEAL's Community Members are integrating gender into their schemes. It highlighted the important role systems can play in reducing gender inequalities and improving women's empowerment.

Download below the PowerPoint presentation for the Practicalities of EU Deforestation  Regulation (EUDR) Implementation breakfast session  at the ISEAL Global Sustainability Symposium 2024

On 12 November, ISEAL convened a cross-industry working session at the Zunfthaus zur Zimmerleuten in Zurich, Switzerland, bringing together companies and sustainability systems to strengthen their partnerships for greater impact. This invitation-only workshop, supported by the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO), employed an Appreciative Inquiry approach to foster open dialogue about what works well in business-sustainability system partnerships and to collectively identify and prioritise practical improvements for the future.