Responsible Sourcing: A Practical Guide

The One Planet Network’s Sustainable Food System (SFS) Programme contributes to a transformation towards sustainable food systems that was called for at the UN Food Systems Summit in 2021. The SFS Programme is a partnership focused on urgent transformation towards sustainable food systems as a critical strategy to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.

The SFS Programme has four objectives and five cross-cutting themes to support its goal of accelerating the shift to sustainable food systems. The Programme has developed a range of tools to providing guidance for the transformation to sustainable food systems.

This paper, produced in 2023, provides recommendations on implementing Target 15(a), especially the way governments can take legal, administrative, or policy measures to:

1) Encourage and enable businesses to regularly monitor, assess, and transparently disclose their risks, dependencies and impacts on biodiversity; and

2) Require all large, and transnational companies and financial institutions do so, including along their operations, supply and value chains, and portfolios. The paper also contains information, resources and capacity-building opportunities, recommendations for businesses to act now on assessment and disclosure, and case studies of government policies and business action on disclosure. The paper focuses on paragraph 15(a) as the most urgent starting point to ensure business and financial institutions are assessing and disclosing nature-related risks, dependencies, and impacts, and that this information is included in all decision-making by the private sector, finance, and governments.

We protect wildlife in wild places, and on private lands in-between, by certifying enterprises that assure people and nature coexist and thrive. Certification ensures the transparency and integrity of our activities.
We harness the power of enterprise to provide incentives for the protection of biodiversity around the world, and offer economic opportunity to people whose basic needs have put them in conflict with wildlife.
We link Wildlife Friendly® products and producers to consumers, enabling powerful brands to differentiate themselves in a crowded and increasingly values-driven marketplace.

The Fashion Forever Green Pact is a call for the fashion industry—brands, retailers and manufacturers alike—to take immediate action to ensure responsible sourcing on behalf of the world’s forests. Commitment is the catalyst for industry-wide change. It’s time for less talk, more action.

Transforming our global food systems is central to meeting the largest challenges faced by humanity, including climate change, biodiversity loss, food insecurity and risks to future pandemics. The current food system is responsible for a third of greenhouse gases, 80% of deforestation, 70% of terrestrial biodiversity loss, and has been linked to a dramatic rise in our exposure to zoonotic diseases, such as Ebola, SARS, and COVID-19.

A healthy future requires us to halt and reverse biodiversity loss and limit climate change while meeting the fundamental human right to healthy and nutritious food for all. It is only possible to achieve this by transforming our food systems and adopting nature-positive production practices at scale and within planetary boundaries. Different solutions will be required in different contexts, but agroecological approaches, that apply ecological and social principles to agricultural production, are a fundamental part of this transformation.

The upcoming UN Food Systems Summit provides a unique opportunity to accelerate the adoption of agroecological approaches and to ensure that its relevant principles can be transferred to all nature-positive production practices. Aligned with outcomes of the conferences of the UN Framework to Combat Climate Change and UN Convention on Biological Diversity, such practices and principles when adopted at scale will bring us closer to achieving the 2030 Sustainability Agenda. Protecting nature and improving livelihoods, agroecological approaches deliver resilience and will advance all Sustainable Development Goals.

WWF is committed to further exploring how agroecological approaches can be implemented at pace and scale. We are delighted to present this paper, outlining the actions that can be taken at different levels and by different actors. We look forward to working in partnership with farming communities, civil society organizations, scientists, as well as public and private sectors to implement agroecological approaches as part of nature-positive food systems, for the benefit of both people and planet.

The MSC Fisheries Standard is used to assess if a fishery is well-managed and sustainable.

To become MSC certified, fisheries voluntarily apply to be assessed against the Standard. It is open to all fisheries that catch marine or freshwater organisms in the wild. The fishery must meet all three principles of the MSC Standard: sustainable stocks; minimal environmental impact; and effective management. A certified catch can be sold with the MSC blue fish label. The Fisheries Certification Process (FCP) is the instruction manual for assessors and sets out how the MSC Fisheries Standard should be interpreted during assessments.