Public Consultation for the ‘Guide on High Carbon Stock Approach (HCSA) requirements for the RSPO’

The RSPO Secretariat wishes to announce that the ‘Guide on HCSA requirements for the RSPO’ has just been released for a 30-day public consultation from 19 November – 19 December 2021.

This guidance document was developed by the No Deforestation Task Force (NDTF) with the objective of assisting RSPO members who are required to conduct either a standalone HCSA or integrated High Conservation Value (HCV)-HCSA assessment. It highlights the pre-assessment, assessment stage, and post assessment requirements within the HCSA toolkit V2.0 and the High Conservation Value Network (HCVN)’s HCV-HCSA manual, and guides readers on where these requirements can be integrated within RSPO’s existing processes/ procedures/ requirements in order to:

• Ensure the assessment requirements are met prior to submission of the standalone HCSA/ integrated HCV-HCSA assessment report for their respective review processes.

• Streamline and minimise duplication of activities where both RSPO processes and assessments require similar elements [e.g. Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) activities, identification of peat, social and environmental impact assessment (SEIA) etc.] within each respective process. 

The draft of the document and commenting template can be downloaded from the links below. Kindly send in your feedback using the provided template to [email protected]. Closing date for comments and feedback regarding the document is 6:00 PM (GMT+8), 19 December 2021.