Gold Standard appoints Margaret N. Kim as CEO

The Gold Standard Foundation Board of Directors today announces the organisation's incoming CEO, Margaret N. Kim.

Kim joins Gold Standard from her most recent post as the Head of Green Climate Fund Liaison in the Office of Director-General for the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI), where she previously was Head of Strategy & Integration. Kim has also held leadership roles in the private sector, including as General Manager, Sales, Strategy and Business Development for a leading biotechnology company. 

Kim has been selected to lead Gold Standard through its next phase of scaling impact and will also lead the Foundation's strategic partnership with Marion Verles, Gold Standard's outgoing CEO, as Verles transitions to her new role as CEO of SustainCERT. Their collaboration will focus on mainstreaming credible impact certification to help realise the organisations' joint vision of "climate security and sustainable development for all."

"Gold Standard has already demonstrated its ability to mainstream sustainable development within carbon markets," says Gold Standard President and former Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), Yvo de Boer. "Margaret Kim will draw on her experience with upstream policy work and resource mobilisation to help Gold Standard penetrate development finance, impact investment and corporate sustainability.” Kim adds, “Credible impact quantification has only scratched the surface, yet it has the potential to drive a paradigm shift to valuing what really matters, above and beyond financial returns. I look forward to leading a dynamic team to help accelerate this transition."

Gold Standard, which in March surpassed the milestone of issuing over 100 million carbon credits, launched in 2018 a Value Change programme for corporate supply chain interventions and a Fund Level Impact Certification solution to quantify the real outcomes of development finance and impact investment. These innovations under its next generation standard, Gold Standard for the Global Goals, are designed to scale Gold Standard's hallmark approach of placing sustainable development at the center of climate action to help achieve the Paris Climate Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals.

About Gold Standard

Gold Standard was established in 2003 by WWF and other international NGOs as a best practice standard to ensure projects that reduced carbon emissions under the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) also contributed to sustainable development. Its next-generation standard launched in 2017, Gold Standard for the Global Goals, allows climate and development initiatives to quantify, certify, and maximise their impacts toward climate security and sustainable development. Certification against the standard provides the confidence that these results are measured and verified, enabling credible tracking of progress toward the Paris Climate Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals. Gold Standard now has a broad NGO Supporter Network and 1500+ projects in over 80 countries, creating billions of dollars of shared value from climate and development action worldwide.