Transparency in Plantation Concession Boundaries

To : RSPO Member Growers and Accredited Certification Bodies,
 
The 10th General Assembly of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, has resolved that:
 
"It is mandatory for grower members to make their existing concession boundaries publicly available in digital format (shapefile) via the RSPO website." 
 
Resolution 6g:
Transparency in plantation concession boundaries.
Please download resolution 6g at – https://rspo.org/file/resolutions/GA10-Resolution6g.pdf
 
With that, RSPO requires grower member to submit certified estate / New Planting area maps in appropriate format (Shape file, KML, KMZ) through accredited/ approved Certification Bodies for all NPP notification report / Principles & criteria (P&C) assessment reports.
 
The recommended minimum general technical requirements for Maps in the reports are listed as the following:
 
• TITLE
• SCALE INDICATOR – Minimum scale 1:50,000
• ORIENTATION
• CLEAR BORDER(s) – readable quality
• LEGEND – Informative and readable legend
• MAP LOCALITY (map is contextualized in a wider area with a smaller map)
• PROJECTION is necessary to combine and overlay maps with minimum distortion. 
• GEO-REFERENCE (using map coordinates, such as latitude and longitude or Universal Transverse Mercator) is crucial because shows how any map relates to real world coordinates and allows for combining data from different sources.
• SOURCE(s) of the map
 
In a separate letter to accredited/ approved Certification Bodies on 19 May 2014, it requires the submission of digitalized area maps in required format (by email) to RSPO Certification Manager with effective from 2 June 2014.
 
There may be situations where there is justifiable reason of such maps are not available at time of document submission for concession undertaking P&C certification or New Planting notification, RSPO could accept proposal for submission of the digitalized area maps at later date of not later than 30 September 2014.
 
by Rountable on Sustainable Palm Oil