any organisations, companies and governments are responding to the urgency of the global environmental crisis and mounting social inequality by reassessing and increasing the level of ambition of their sustainability commitments, policies and activities. The need to show results of these has brought with it a discernible shift in emphasis towards reporting sustainability outcomes and impacts: the short and long term effects of interventions undertaken to improve sustainability.

The use of Voluntary Standards Systems, such as Fairtrade, Bonsucro, FSC and LEAF, is one of the few non-regulatory tools that many companies and consumers have to ensure that what they buy and sell has been produced sustainably. Like other actors, these schemes are increasingly focusing on measuring sustainability outcomes. However, measuring outcomes across diverse issues, scales and contexts is far from technically straightforward, and often involves considerable costs. There are a wide range of available performance metrics out there and standards systems need to be able to choose the right ones for the job so that they can credibly communicate how their activities impact upon sustainability issues that people care about.

ISEAL commissioned 3Keel to research metrics for six critical sustainability issues: greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, water use, biodiversity, poverty and forced labour. The focus was on identifying the different types of metric available. These ranged from those that require in-field data collection such as species counts, to those based on modelling. We then evaluated the various metrics and data sources in terms of their applicability; the degree to which they are underpinned by evidence and address material impacts; their context-sensitivity; and the practicality of the associated data collection and analysis. The report presented an evaluation of the benefits, limitations and trade-offs associated with the use of each metric. It also provided case studies of user experiences, based on interviews with organisations that have used different metrics in their sustainability reporting.

As well as presenting different metrics, the publicly available report gave an insight into the process of considering and understanding the suitability of certain metrics for different purposes. In this way, it offers a resource to support standard systems and other sustainability initiatives to consider metrics which can help them move towards more data-driven outcome claims when reporting sustainability performance.

Authored by Caitlin McCormack, Steve Jennings and Robert Lefebure (ISEAL)

The full report can be found here

2025 update: the analysis and principles in this report continue to be relevant asemerging frameworks like CSDDD, TCFD and TNFD, SBTI and SBTN, and EUDR are requiring companies to measure and report metrics on their impacts across sustainability outcomes including greenhouse gas emissions, human rights, deforestation, and nature and biodiversity.