On 10th July, Gold Standard published ‘Gold Standard for the Global Goals,’ a next-generation standard to quantify and certify impacts toward climate security and the Sustainable Development Goals. Since 2003, Gold Standard has been allowing carbon pricing to deliver dividends to sustainable development. With this new framework, projects can continue to choose to issue carbon credits for either compliance and voluntary offsetting purposes, finding higher price points because of the rigorous environmental and social safeguards and SDG benefits. But projects can now also choose to issue Certified Emission Reduction Statements, which will allow mitigation projects to avoid risks of double counting post-2020, but continue to seek financing for their climate and development impacts. This new certification approach will also allow companies to certify the emission reductions in their value chains without issuing carbon credits – to make credible claims about the impacts of their climate finance contributions. This can also help translate internal carbon pricing programs into real environmental and social value. Gold Standard’s partnership with the UNFCC Secretariat will seek to develop new tools and technologies for corporates and other non-state actors to measure and report on the SDG impacts associate with their climate action.
Gold Standard will be convening programs to develop, test and scale innovative applications of Gold Standard for the Global Goals. If you’d like to learn more about collaboration opportunities, please contact sandra.genee@goldstandard.org.
