Environmental Labels Instruments for sustainability

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Environmental Labels Instruments for
sustainability?

• Veerle Dossche
• FERN Bioenergy Campaign

The campaigning NGO for greater environmental and
social justice, with a focus on forests and
forest peoples rights in the policies and
practices of the EU
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What is certification

• Certification is a process to confirm that
  specific requirements (standards) relating to a
  product, process, system or body are fulfilled.
  There are many approaches with varying degree of
  structure and rigor
• First party claims (self certification)
• Second party verification
• Third party certification
• Most well known environmental certification
  schemes are third-party certification (FSC, PEFC,
  MSC etc). We should not underestimate impact of
  first party claim.

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• Certification, if combined with labelling, is a
  market-based instrument, to help consumers choose
  ethical or environmental products.

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What are the limitations of certification?

• Certification cannot address policy and
  institutional failures
• Certification cannot address over-consumption.
• Certification cannot address macro-effects,
  e.g.
• displacement of activities e.g. to high
  conservation value areas, indirect GHG emissions,
  
• impact on food security and livelihood,
• segmentation of the market (eg certified products
  are for export market or for another sector and
  so certification does not lead to reduction of
  problem)
• Certification creates a burden for good
  suppliers i.e. certification schemes increase
  costs for good or sustainable products but
  leave market open for non-good non
  sustainable products.

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some examples

• Without good land use planning, such as in
  Indonesia, palmoil expansion will continue at the
  cost of forests and peoples. Assuring that
  palmoil will be sustainably produced does not
  take away the bigger environmental and social
  problems, caused by the expansions of palmoil
  (see report from FOE).
• Countries with high forest cover, such as in the
  Congo Basin, are using certification as an
  argument to log intact forests and claim money
  for Reducing Emission from Deforestation and
  Forest Degradation (REDD), thereby worsening the
  forest and climate crisis.
• The sugar cane certification scheme is currently
  aiming at certification for the export and
  thereby risks aggravating problems for domestic
  production by segementation of the market.

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1. Respect the limits of certification2.
Educate policy makers about the limits of
certification3. Work on addressing policy
failures (certification cannot and should not
replace this)

• Preliminary conclusion

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But where certification can play a role

• pay attention to the following

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When evaluating a scheme look at who is in power?

• Who owns the certification scheme ? (Is it
  Northern dominated ?)
• What are the schemes objectives ? (market share
  or niche market)
• How is the scheme governed ? ( industry dominated
  or truly multi-stakeholder)
• Examples (see report from FOE)
• BSI (sugar cane) does not represent sugarcane
  growers or workers from Mercosur countries (the
  worlds biggest sugarcane growing region)
• RTRS (soy) 80 of its industry members are from
  the EU

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Basic elements of certification schemes

Product claims
certification
accreditation
Certification scheme
Tracing
Labeling
Standard
Source Proforest
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For standard setting look at

• Development of the standard (who is involved how
  are decisions made, etc)
• Content of the standard (performance based level
  of ambiguity)
• Stakeholder participation (information sharing or
  real and equal participation of all stakeholders)
• Applicability (scope)

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Certification

• How to interpret the standard?
• Are field visits required?
• Certification valid for?
• Is there a functioning complaints mechanism?
• How to carry out proper consultation process
• Many of the agrofuel commodity schemes are still
  under development and have not developed
  operational requirements and no clear
  certification procedures.

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Accreditation

• What is the relationship between the
  accreditation organisation and the certification
  body?
• What are rules for accreditation?
• How to assess the performance of the
  certification body?
• How to ensure the accreditation organisation is
  strong and independent enough?

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Labeling

• What is the content of claim as on the label?
• How are claims being verified, ie. Is there a
  chain of custody in place? What is the quality of
  the chain of custody? Is there physical
  segregation between certified and non certified
  products?
• Examples
• In timber certification no segregation required
  (apart from for legality?)
• Claims about membership of a certification scheme
  (RTRS)

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Conclusions

• Certification has clear limitations and can only
  work effectively within the right policy
  framework
• Using certification as a tool in the absence of
  the right policy framework, dealing with
  macro-issues, can have serious negative
  environmental or social consequences.
• The agrofuels debate is a typical example of
  using certification before the right policy
  framework has been put in place regulating
  consumption (i.e. in the North), requiring
  participatory land-use planing (i.e. in the
  South)
• Certification schemes in the agrofuels sector
  have more in-built problems.
• Developing a certification scheme is time
  consuming. Agrofuels certifications schemes are
  not even ready and are being mis-used already.

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www.fern.org
Avenue de lYser 4 Brussels 1040 Belgium t
32 (0)2 733 08 14 e veerle_at_fern.org m 32
(0)498 54 48 73
The campaigning NGO for greater environmental and
social justice, with a focus on forests and
forest peoples rights in the policies and
practices of the EU