Business self-regulation undermines the GBF
But is this really so? Let´s look at some processes of business self-regulation
A Greenpeace report called “certified destruction” shows that certification – one of the most promoted means of self-regulation- is a weak tool to address global forest and ecosystem destruction. Too many certified companies continue to be linked to forest and ecosystem destruction, land disputes and human rights abuses. 8 certification schemes were analysed using 11 criteria, in the categories of governance and decision making, strength of standards, transparency and traceability, audits, and implementation.
All of them scored negative on many of the criteria. Strikingly on some criteria NONE of the certification companies scored positive. This included criteria such as:
· No major breaches of standards
· Clear and effective compensatory remediation and restoration procedures and mechanisms for past breaches of key standards
· Full independence of audits via a ‘firewall’ between a certification body and a company
· Requires the principles of ecological agriculture/forestry?
Complementary, a Friends of the Earth Netherlands report on Palm Oil Certification by RSPO “Not out of the Woods” demonstrated how there are critical gaps in RSPO practices and their policies for consultation processes, which undermine the credibility of the certificates. This included issues such as:
· Discrepancies between overly ambitious standards and lack of thorough guidance, leading to methodological weaknesses during consultation
· Inadequate sampling of relevant stakeholders to be consulted during audits. Communities and companies report that auditors do not always visit relevant affected communities who live adjacent to relevant sites or who may actually have been evicted.
· RSPO indicators for assessing FPIC are predominantly process-indicators and rely almost exclusively on paper-based assessments of compliance from secondary sources and company self-reporting, which is often not valid
· Audits are often done without the allocation of adequate time and resources
· Harassment and reprisals against participants in consultation processes
Currently, certification enables destructive businesses to continue operating as usual. Policy makers rely upon the assurances by business that they are addressing the problems, and therefore step back from regulating them.
At the same time, by improving the image of commodities that put forest and ecosystems at risk, so stimulating demand, certification may actually increase the harm caused by the expansion of commodity production. Certification schemes thus end up greenwashing products linked to deforestation, ecosystem destruction and rights abuses.
This also has strong implications for Target 16, as it requests consumers to buy responsibly; however they are not in a position to do so, because, in addition to the absence of regulation, they lack the information they need to do so.
By Nele Mariën, Friends of the Earth International