WWF’s Certification Assessment Tool: Credibly Incredible

11 April 2014 News

The WWF Certification Assessment Tool (CAT) is devised to assign credibility to, and promote, WWF-founded soft commodities certification systems. 

Designed in a manner that pre-determines the outcome by utilizing criteria framed to favour WWF-founded certification systems, the WWF CAT also disguises some of their widely discussed weaknesses on important sustainability issues, whilst at the same time discrediting and discriminating against non-WWF, independent certification systems.

Because WWF fails to disclose in the WWF CAT its relationship with WWF-founded certification systems  and the control it continues to exert over them, WWF prevent stakeholders from recognizing the WWF CAT as biased. WWF also understates  that the WWF CAT is an internal mechanism, aligned with the specific Key Performance Indicators of its Market Transformation Initiative (MTI).  By appearing to be impartial, WWF takes advantage of its global brand recognition to lend credibility to WWF-founded certification systems, and to then utilize the influence, reach and campaigning power it enjoys as “the most powerful environmental organization in the world”   to promote, as an apparently impartial observer, its own WWF-founded certification systems as the “best performing schemes”  at the expense of independent certification systems.

PEFC calls on WWF to live up to basic standards concerning transparency, independence and impartiality. WWF is to ensure that stakeholders have complete and comprehensive information when forming an opinion about WWF-founded as well as independent soft commodities sustainability certification systems through, among other things:

• disclosure of WWF’s vested interests in many of the world’s best known certification systems
• transparent reporting about WWF formal and informal relationships, including financial and in-kind support
• independent assessments of the influence of WWF in the processes of WWF-founded certification systems to ensure that WWF (or any other organization) cannot exert undue dominance
• provision of verifiable and detailed information concerning the financial contributions WWF receives from public and private donors for its certification-related activities

Only such disclosure and transparency will allow stakeholders to assess the validity and credibility of WWF’s claims about its own certification systems. In the absence of such disclosure, lack of impartiality and independence, the WWF CAT is credibly incredible.

PEFC urges WWF to be more objective when investing its millions in assessing certification systems. If WWF was less concerned with self-serving promotion of WWF-founded systems and bolder in its vision to improve the outcomes and impacts of certification systems as a component of transforming the market, society’s interests would be far better served.