THE STATE OF SUSTAINABLE MARKETS STATISTICS AND EMERGING TRENDS 2015

The report documents the rapid growth of voluntary sustainability standards (VSS) in agriculture and forestry between 2008 and 2014. It highlights that all surveyed standards experienced growth in compliant areas, with the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil showing the most significant expansion. The document provides detailed statistics for commodities including bananas, cocoa, coffee, cotton, palm oil, soybeans, sugarcane, tea, and forestry, while identifying critical data gaps in multiple certification, pricing, and consumption patterns that hinder policy planning.

• All voluntary sustainability standards (VSS) included in the report experienced growth in compliant areas since 2008, with the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) seeing the largest increase, expanding its certified area almost 30 times between 2008 and 2014.
• Specific commodity growth rates varied: Rainforest Alliance/SAN tea area expanded ten times between 2010 and 2014, UTZ Certified cocoa grew seven times in the same period, and Better Cotton Initiative verified cotton quadrupled between 2011 and 2014.
• Certified forest area grew by 41% between 2008 and 2014, with the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) increasing by 82% to 187 million hectares and the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC) expanding by 21% to 263 million hectares by 2014.
• Organic agriculture is the largest sustainability standard by area and commodity variety, with more than 43 million hectares certified in 2013, representing 0.9% of global agricultural land.
• Single-sector standards tend to dominate in the sectors where they exist (coffee, cotton, forestry, oil palm, sugarcane, and soy), often accounting for more than half of all certified production in those sectors.
• The report identifies four primary data gaps that limit the visibility of VSS in policy planning: a lack of reliable information on multiple certification, insufficient pricing data for compliant products, missing consumption patterns and customer demographics, and a lack of VSS-specific Harmonized System (HS) coding.
• In 2013, UTZ Certified cocoa held the highest share of a global commodity area among the surveyed standards, covering 15% of the global cocoa area.

APA

International Institute for Sustainable Development (2015). THE STATE OF SUSTAINABLE MARKETS STATISTICS AND EMERGING TRENDS 2015. https://www.iisd.org/sites/default/files/pdf/2015/SSM_2015.pdf

Chicago

International Institute for Sustainable Development. THE STATE OF SUSTAINABLE MARKETS STATISTICS AND EMERGING TRENDS 2015. 2015. https://www.iisd.org/sites/default/files/pdf/2015/SSM_2015.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=International Institute for Sustainable Development |title=THE STATE OF SUSTAINABLE MARKETS STATISTICS AND EMERGING TRENDS 2015 |date=2015 |url=https://www.iisd.org/sites/default/files/pdf/2015/SSM_2015.pdf |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{internationalinstituteforsustainabledevelopment2015state, author = {{International Institute for Sustainable Development}}, title = {{THE STATE OF SUSTAINABLE MARKETS STATISTICS AND EMERGING TRENDS 2015}}, institution = {International Institute for Sustainable Development}, year = {2015}, url = {https://www.iisd.org/sites/default/files/pdf/2015/SSM_2015.pdf}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }