Continued collaboration with Roundtable of Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO)

In November 2023, Proforest took part in the Annual Roundtable Conference on Sustainable Palm Oil (RT2023) by the Roundtable of Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) in Jakarta, Indonesia.

Themed “Partners for the Next 20”, RT2023 provided a collaborative space for stakeholders to explore to ways to address the core challenges facing the sustainable palm oil industry. The event saw a participation of an upwards of 900 attendees.

Proforest’s Bilge Daldeniz, Director of Multi-stakeholder Initiatives spoke on the panel of the plenary session titled "Bridging the Gap - Empowering Smallholders to Succeed Amidst Tightening International Regulations’’.

During the session, Bilge shared initial findings from the ongoing gap analysis between the European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) and RSPO independent smallholder standards. She added existing tools such as the RSPO smallholder certification can prepare smallholders to meet EUDR requirements and other due diligence compliance requirements.

On the side, the Working Group for Aligning Palm Trader Performance Assessment, which represents nine organisations across the world that are involved in assessing palm oil supply chains, introduced an aligned global questionnaire at RT2023.

The Working Group, which includes CDP and SPOTT, has created an aligned set of questions, which builds on the Accountability Framework Initiative’s alignment process and Common Methodology. The aligned set will be used by all involved organisations and initiatives in their assessments from early 2024. A briefing session was held to share with interested stakeholders on the background and application of the questionnaire.