Is certification dead yet?

Is Certification Dead Yet?
Part 106,324: RSPCA's Assured scheme in hot water.

Another case of a voluntary certification scheme that appears to have gone awry.

How Britain’s oldest animal welfare charity became a byword for cruelty on an industrial scale

Though everything in the article is 'alleged' and I get nervous when I read about 'expert assessors,' when RSPCA's own President is quoted saying things are bad, then things are probably bad. At the very least, there's probably some fire given the smoke.

Certification really needs replacing.

It's propped up by large companies and large NGOs across so many industries, so many sectors, because it's a wonderful money making machine for them and all those who spend millions of their marketing budgets to tell us it's great, who ask loudest, "If not certification, then what?" For those who ride the increasingly turbulent waves from exposé to exposé, clinging to the strategy that if they sit quietly for long enough and say nothing, the noise will die down and they can get back to counting their money. Like a poker player on a run at a casino table, you never hear them say much lest they disturb the magic.

Nothing much has changed since 2015 when I published Beyond Certification. Well, that's not true...the number and scale of the schemes out there has exploded, there are even more millions being generated.

Yet those the schemes are apparently designed to benefit appear to be falling further and further behind.

For me, the answer is transparency. If you want to make a claim, then publicly and transparently share the data, reports, documents etc to verify it. Let people who know a thing or three look at everything you have to share and let them form their own opinions. Radical transparency can democratise verification.

Paying a certifier, accredited or not, to assess you and magically issue you a certificate can no longer be credible, surely?

Big non-profits running or supporting schemes that profit from money paid by big companies...fishy, no?

At Pond Foundation, we've built Earthtrust, a simple platform where courageous, transparency radical organisations - companies, non-profits, anyone - who care for the truth, can show their data and proof to back up their claims. Earthtrust is not the enemy of certification; it's the enemy of greenwashing but in so far as certification is a big enabler of greenwashing, then certification schemes should be nervous.

We're not being overwhelmed by organisations wanting to sign up. Pond Foundation and one of our members, Apella Advisors, are so far the only courageous ones. But more claims are being prepared with those wanting to build their brand on trust, not the money they pay to greenwashers.

It's feisty language, but for goodness sakes, how many exposés do we need to realise that certification should be consigned to history? How much suffering, in a world that's going profoundly toward trouble, will we accept?