A focus on sustainability assurance

A revision of the AA1000 Assurance Standard was launched on 24 October by AccountAbility, an organisation which develops tools and standards for organizational accountability. The standard forms the basis for IRCA’s new Certified Sustainability Assurance Practitioner (CSAP) training programme and aims to provide a credible foundation for sustainability assurance.

At the launch, Sandy Sutherland, corporate technical manager at LRQA, said: ‘It’s time to take stock and capture best practice. AA1000 will give credibility to the quality of sustainability assurance reporting and a balanced approach on both long- and short- term levels.’

AA1000AS was first published in 2003 and is aimed at assurance providers to guide the manner in which they provide assurance. The revision provision, since 2006, has involved consultations in more than 20 countries, as well as the use of a wiki to gather ideas from as many sources as possible.

CSAP is for practitioners in sustainability assurance, both internal and external, of the organization whose performance is being assured. The programme has been informed by an extensive multi-stakeholder consultation process and is built on an AA2000 platform. It consists of four modules than can be done separately or as a full five-day course and a training organization can apply for certification of any number or combination of the four modules.

Robert Skelton-Stroud, certification manager, said of the new relationship between IRCA and AccountAbility:‘This is a good opportunity to benefit from IRCA’s experience in training course certification and from its well-established and global training organization network to make sustainability assurance training available and accessible worldwide.’

For more information please visit http://www.irca.org/certification/certification_11.html