What is the future of sustainability certifications?

Sustainability certifications no longer want to be certifications, not as traditionally conceived, anyway. Many are evolving into broader frameworks to support the design of corporate, regional, and national governance/regulation.

Examples of transformation

My favourite examples are the Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) and Gold Standard, two pioneer voluntary carbon offset certifications. Both organisations were prototypical certifications, but they transformed significantly over time.

VCS became Verra, an organisation that “develops and manages standards that are globally applicable and advance action across a wide range of sectors and activities”.¹ Verra now has several frameworks in addition to its original carbon offset certification programme. Some of these frameworks go beyond what is typically conceived as a certification.

• Verra’s Jurisdictional and Nested REDD+ (JNR) aims to help national and subnational actors develop jurisdictional rules.²
• Verra’s Plastic Waste Reduction Standard is part of a broader effort known as the 3R Initiative (3RI),³ a collaboration by civil society and the private sector that aims “to jointly develop an innovative and flexible mechanism to scale-up plastic waste recovery and recycling while making a sustainable social impact”.⁴

Gold Standard is now an umbrella framework for “creating robust standards for climate and development interventions”,⁵ the overarching goal being to support the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) from different angles. Some of the newest programmes also go beyond what is typically conceived as a certification.

• With the support of the Germany Ministry of the Environment, the new organisation is working towards “a framework to transition the voluntary carbon market for alignment with new rules emerging from the Paris Agreement”.⁶
• There is also a supply chain effort known as ValueChange, which aims to help corporate actors “reduce emissions in their value chains and to credibly report on these outcomes in line with best-practice accounting and reporting framework such as the GHG Protocol and Science-Based Targets”.⁷

The extent of transformation

Verra and Gold Standard are hardly the only examples. No need to take my word for it—Google it!

• Rainforest Alliance and UTZ recently merged to increase combined coverage ahead of an agriculture and sustainability standard. The move accompanies Rainforest Alliance’s growing interest in becoming a supplier of tailored supply chain services.
• The International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC) and the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) also recently merged into a new effort known as the Value Reporting Foundation (VRF). The goal was a comprehensive reporting framework to help corporate actors report ESG performance. The VRF then went on to consolidate further and is now part of the newly established International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB), itself part of the International Financial Reporting Standards Foundation (IFRS) Foundation.

So what?

If certifications transform into a framework for everything, what gives?

This is a question I like to think about every now and then. I may therefore change my views about it.

That said, currently, I believe that…

• Competitive dynamics in certification spaces may change if and when some of the new meta-certifications prove stronger than competitors. This is somewhat obvious, but interesting nonetheless.
• Increased cooperation across public and private domains might emerge. The new organisations want to support public and private actors in developing standards frameworks. Implied is the question of what kind of cooperation arrangements might emerge; not a particularly novel area of research, but an interesting one.
• If industry (horizontal) and public-private cooperative (vertical) dynamics change, the sources of systemic authority might change alongside, especially if certifications take on roles that state actors cannot fully perform. This is most interesting.

Guessing what might come next

Guessing what the future might bring is hard. The world is such full of irony that even if one makes a prediction that turns 90% correct, the only thing that will matter is the other 10%.

But I, like anyone else, enjoy hypothesising about the future. So, here is what I think might happen in the future.

My hunch is that where public authority is robust, the newly emergent meta-certifications will remain under the tutelage of public actors.

However, where public authority is weak or disorganised, and there are many such places, the meta-certifications currently developing in the background might stand a chance to be recognised as the reliable authority. In some limited areas of activity, of course. No certification is going to replace the state, as such; only a little, perhaps.

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