SIZA ENVIRONMENTAL STANDARD
The SIZA Environmental Pillar of Sustainability
In support of the longer term SIZA vision to include environmental stewardship as an integral offering within sustainability, SIZA has partnered with WWF-SA (the World Wide Fund for Nature, South Africa) and Blue North Sustainability on the technical side to develop an Environmental Standard and appropriate tools to support improvement in environmental indicator measures and management.
The Blue North team developed the content based on leading international and local standards, national legislation and sound ecological principles, and the tool was piloted with a number of producers across the different growing regions. This EPA tool was later developed further into the SIZA Enviro Self-assessment questionnaire and associated Standard document with guidance material, which has recently been benchmarked against the SAI FSA and received a Gold Equivalence rating.
What does it include?
The SIZA Environmental Assurance model has been designed to assist growers in evaluating their current compliance and environmental risks, both at a farm and regional/catchment level. This process is accomplished through the completion of a Self-Assessment Questionnaire (SAQ), the results of which feed into a risk profile report, which can be used to address market requirements, whilst also informing the drafting of site-specific improvement plans and farm environmental management plans and monitoring system. The questions included in the self-assessment questionnaire runs from minimum legal requirements to leading practice across four main topics such as:
- Water
- Soil
- Energy, materials & waste; and
- Farm ecosystems & biodiversity
The SIZA Environmental Standard can be downloaded from your homepage on the MySIZA platform. If you are not yet a member and would like to view the SIZA Standard for benchmarking purposes, please refer to our guidelines on the benchmarking process here. For any other queries relating to the SIZA Standards, please contact the SIZA office on +27 (0) 21 852 8184 or send an email to admin@siza.co.za.”
For information about the verification (Audits) of the SIZA Environmental Standard, please click on the following link:
SIZA Enviro Verification Press Release Aug 18
The SIZA Environmental Assurance Model is built on the following eight principles:
