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.
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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.
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Environmental Markets:
Strengthen environmental markets with more high-impact assets resulting in greater and higher quality supply and demand.
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Corporate Sustainability
Increase action organisations take beyond their boundaries to shift to a Paris-compliant path.
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Climate and Development Finance
Increase mobilisation of climate finance toward high integrity climate and development activities for national/subnational climate action.
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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.
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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.
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SHARED VALUE CREATED BY CERTIFIED PROJECTS
Gold Standard-certified projects have created over $23.5 Billion in shared value for climate action + sustainable development.