The RSPO Secretariat has been working closely with RSPO members, Certification Bodies (CBs), and the Accreditation Body (AB) to identify ways to ensure that RSPO Standards remain credible in force majeure situations (i.e., war, riots, fire, flood, hurricanes, typhoons, earthquakes, lightning, explosions, strikes, lockouts, slowdowns, pandemics, etc.) and that the absence of on-site audits do not negatively impact our ability to uphold the high level of assurance that is expected from the RSPO Supply Chain Certification Systems.
In March 2020, the RSPO Secretariat released an announcement, “Covid-19 - How we’re adapting for RSPO certification audits” to all its accredited CBs on conducting audits against the 2018 RSPO Principles and Criteria (P&C) and 2020 RSPO Supply Chain Certification (SCC) Standard. Furthermore, on 25 August 2020, the Secretariat introduced the Contingency RSPO Audit Procedure V1, as a guide for CBs to manage and maintain the status of their certificate holders during the pandemic.
The RSPO Secretariat has agreed to revise and replace the previous Contingency RSPO Audit Procedure V1 with this updated version, which is to be used by all RSPO accredited CBs and Units of Certification (UoC) when conducting RSPO Supply Chain Certification Standard audits in a situation of force majeure, which prevented the audit team from conducting an on-site audit.
The updated version of the Contingency RSPO Audit Procedure for Supply Chain Standard (V2) was approved on 19 May 2022, and will enter into force on 1 September 2022. All requirements in the RSPO Supply Chain Certification Systems remain unchanged unless stated otherwise in this document.
This document is available for download via the link below. For any further information/clarification, kindly contact [email protected].
