Brazil has provided decades of experience in how market-based sustainability systems can work together in practice. Building on this, ISEAL brought together sustainability systems, businesses, government, producers and civil society in São Paulo to ask what has worked, what barriers remain and what needs to happen to build a more effective public-private sustainability ecosystem in Brazil by 2030.

Brazil’s role in a changing landscape

Brazil is a major producer and exporter of commodities including soy, beef, coffee, timber, cotton and minerals, placing it at the centre of debates on how sustainability can be delivered across global supply chains.

Climate change, biodiversity loss, geopolitical uncertainty and evolving regulation are increasing expectations of companies and producers. At the same time, Brazil already has important foundations to build on: strong public policy and data infrastructure, experienced producers, established sustainability systems and a long history of collaboration.

From certification to collaboration

On 15 September, stakeholders from across Brazil’s sustainability landscape met in São Paulo for ISEAL’s dialogue on Pathways to impact: the evolving role of market-based sustainability systems in Brazil. A central theme was the need to build on what already exists in Brazil, while addressing the gaps and fragmentation that can limit its effectiveness. Sustainability approaches, public policy, data and market incentives each have a role to play, but their impact depends increasingly on how well they connect. The next phase of sustainability action is therefore likely to depend less on creating new tools for emerging requirements and more on connecting credible infrastructure that already exists.

Experience from sustainability systems highlighted an evolving role for certification. Certification and verification continue to provide credible assurance, support market access and help manage risk, but expectations increasingly extend into traceability, due diligence, measurable impact and wider social and environmental outcomes. This means certification is increasingly one component of a broader sustainability ecosystem rather than a standalone solution.

This evolution also exposes practical tensions. Overlapping standards, audits and data requests can create significant costs and administrative burdens, particularly for smaller producers. Duplication is therefore not only an efficiency issue; it can become an inclusion issue. Greater alignment between sustainability systems, public systems and locally grounded approaches can reduce repeated requirements while maintaining credible assurance. For producers, however, alignment also needs to translate into a clearer value proposition: sustainability requirements are difficult to sustain if costs increase while commercial benefits, support or market differentiation remain unclear.

From ambition to implementation

For businesses and producer organisations, the challenge is increasingly how to integrate sustainability into commercial decision-making rather than manage it through separate compliance processes. Strong Brazilian systems can provide a foundation for international requirements, while greater alignment between standards, data systems and assurance approaches could make that foundation more useful across markets. Better interoperability could help companies make greater use of existing information and infrastructure, freeing resources to focus on improving sustainability outcomes and creating consistent approaches for producers and suppliers.

The deep dive sessions during the day explored three practical ways this shift can happen: building new due diligence requirements into existing systems, using territorial approaches to connect different actors and priorities, and sharing credible assessment information to reduce repeated work. The deep dives highlighted:

• Due diligence can be introduced alongside existing national and sector systems, using pilots and alignment to reduce duplication rather than simply adding another audit for producers.
• Territorial approaches can connect public policy, finance, production, inclusion and market access, rather than treating individual supply chains in isolation.
• Pooling assessment findings among participating companies can create efficiencies and avoid duplication, including in areas such as carbon-credit project assessment.

Towards a stronger ecosystem by 2030

Taken together, these examples point to a broader lesson between now and 2030: the effectiveness of sustainability systems will increasingly depend on the wider ecosystem around them. Public policy, markets, finance, producer organisations and sustainability systems each provide different pieces of the solution. The challenge is to help those pieces reinforce one another rather than operate in parallel.

The foundations for this next phase, include the regulatory framework, public data infrastructure, producer experience and history of multistakeholder and precompetitive collaboration. The persistent gaps are increasingly about implementation, alignment and incentives.  

A stronger producer value proposition will be central to that effort. Producers are being asked to provide more data, demonstrate traceability, respond to new regulatory expectations and invest in improved environmental and social performance.  

Those expectations need to be matched by practical support and clearer benefits, including reduced duplication, access to markets, technical support and finance. Stronger engagement from the financial sector is therefore not separate from sustainability implementation: it is part of enabling producers and businesses to make the investments that new expectations require.  

The opportunity now is to build on Brazil’s existing strengths, connecting tools, institutions and incentives in ways that support more effective action and greater impact.

ISEAL is proud to be supported by the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) for this event.