Chapter 6: Environment
Agriculture can have positive or negative effects on the natural environment, depending on how it is managed. The Environment chapter outlines pathways for certified farms to positively impact the planet, and its forests, biodiversity, water and climate.
Generally, only a few changes have been made to this chapter. We have removed some of the mandatory or self-selected improvement requirements from the Sustainable Agriculture Standard version 1.3. Some of those will be moved to the specialized standards that we will launch in 2025 and 2026.
For instance, the former mandatory improvements on human-wildlife conflict have been removed as well as the former self-selected smart meter on Greenhouse Gas emission reduction.
You can review all changes to the environment requirements in the documentation found in the Resources section. The Standard v1.4 contains an overview table that lists all changes compared with v1.3.