Vision
+ Impacts
We manage best practice standards for climate and sustainable development interventions to maximise impact, creating value for people around the world and the planet we share.
Gold Standard was established in 2003 by WWF and other international NGOs to ensure projects that reduced carbon emissions featured the highest levels of environmental integrity and also contributed to sustainable development. With the adoption of the Paris Climate Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals, we launched a best practice standard for climate and sustainable development interventions, Gold Standard for the Global Goals, to maximise impact, creating value for people around the world and the planet we share.
Our Values
PIONEERING
For more than a decade, Gold Standard has shown how climate finance can achieve its highest potential. Now, we are pushing this further, creating innovative new programmes and tools that can be integrated to deliver impacts at a greater scale.
RIGOROUS
We will build upon our reputation for quality and rigour with more robust measurement of outcomes and deeper impact across the Sustainable Development Goals.
COLLABORATIVE
To realize our ambitious vision, we will join forces with strategic partners who share our goals and complement our strenghts.
TRANSPARENT
We were established to bring confidence, trust, and accountability to carbon markets.We will continue to take strides to improve transparency in our own processes and broader market.
Our Strategy
We seek to accelerate progress toward the Paris Agreement and Sustainable Development Goals through robust standards and verified impacts. We do so by reducing barriers to market entry, increasing capacity, and incentivising more action across three strategic pillars: environmental markets, corporate sustainability and climate + development finance.
Theory of Change
By creating robust standards for climate and development interventions that enable the credible measurement of impact, Gold Standard aims to create $100 billion in shared value by 2030.
Our Impact
Gold Standard was founded on the principle that climate action cannot be one-dimensional - climate projects must deliver meaningful sustainable development benefits beyond emission reductions. The success of our approach has influenced both the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and other voluntary standards to raise the bar and include sustainable development within some of their climate projects. This all helps deliver on our mission to catalyse more ambitious climate action to achieve the Global Goals.
2900
PROJECTS
IN OVER 100 COUNTRIES
238
MILLION
TONNES OF CO2E REDUCED
36
BILLION
DOLLARS OF SHARED VALUE CREATED
Shared value created by certified projects
Gold Standard-certified projects have created over $36 Billion in shared value for climate action + sustainable development.
Interested in the value created by the Gold Standard carbon credits you've purchased? The figures below provide the shared value created per carbon credit for some of our different project types.
To see how these shared value figures are calculated, refer to these research studies led by environmental economists:
- Valuating the benefits of improved cooking solutions, Vivid Economics
- The real value of robust climate action, Net Balance