From Best Practices to Proven Impacts: Expanding and Measuring Conservation Benefits of Agricultural Sustainability Standards in Tropical Production Landscapes

Overview

Generating evidence for standards as conservation strategy

As agricultural sustainability standards grow in number and scale, better evidence is needed to understand and improve the role of standards and certification as a conservation strategy. In July 2013, more than 20 conservation scientists and representatives of standards bodies, conservation NGOs, agricultural financiers, and others convened for a day-long workshop to identify new opportunities to generate such evidence.

Systematically apply existing tools

Workshop participants identified that while a range of useful evaluation methods and tools already exists, they must be more systematically applied and incorporated into projects, programs, and standards. Participants agreed that there is considerable scope for collaboration within the standards community and with researchers to align methods and indicators, and to combine basic data across all major certification systems with rigorous in-depth studies to provide a much more robust composite portrait of outcomes and impacts.

More coordination between researchers and data users

To accomplish this will require new efforts to support the standards community in collecting reliable data at scale; more systematic coordination between researchers and users of evaluation research results; and significantly increased funding for priority evaluation research. Two immediate next steps emerging from the workshop are: 1) to publish a journal article articulating the mandate and defining an agenda for improved evaluation; and 2) to develop concept proposals to advance the needs stated above.