SustainCERT is a global leader in climate impact verification. Since 2018 it has been on a mission to bring credibility to climate action.  

Climate impact projects seek to reduce emissions. They are essential to any country or corporate meeting its net zero targets, but the climate impact verification industry is one of the last to achieve its digital transition. Independent verification of project impact delivers third party assessment of the results, providing credibility and trust.

Current methods to report, validate or verify emissions reductions are outdated. Manual processes, such as complicated excel spreadsheets and relying on people on the ground to share accurate calculations of their climate impact, can result in a lack of precise data and long timescales in a project’s impact being verified. SustainCERT’s team has developed a world-leading software platform for digital verification which will provide a faster, more accurate and scalable way to ensure climate projects deliver real, tangible impact.

The idea for SustainCERT came to CEO Marion Verles almost two decades ago on a trip to Cambodia. In 2005, having started her career in finance, she was on an assignment and saw on the ground how carbon markets could effectively channel finance into climate projects and bridge the gap of development finance. Working closely with carbon market project developers, she also experienced first hand how manual, tedious and costly the process to issue carbon credits was.  

The realisation that there had to be a better way to do it became clearer when Marion joined The Gold Standard as CEO in 2014. At a time when the market was hitting a low, far fewer projects were entering the pipeline because of low prices and high transaction costs. She identified a solution was to create momentum through the development of a ground-breaking new climate and sustainable development impact standard: Gold Standard for the Global Goals. 

It quickly became clear that raising the bar would be a complex task. Marion identified the market needed practical, accessible ways to achieve higher standards which led to the founding of SustainCERT in 2018, spun out of The Gold Standard. The aim was to drive adoption of credible impact measurement across environmental markets, corporate sustainability reporting and sustainable finance, and the mission was to identify how technology could support the scaling of this.

Today SustainCERT works with carbon market project developers, and global corporates investing in Scope 3 projects to decarbonize their value chains. Its approach aligns with and contributes to leading international sustainability frameworks – including the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, the UK Sustainable Development Goals, Gold Standard and Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi).  

SustainCERT’s digital verification platform is a first in the market, but collective success requires true collaboration across the ecosystem to speed up the digital transition to address the climate emergency.  One of SustainCERT’s values is “pragmatic activism” – and on this basis Marion passionately believes that the ecosystem is not moving fast enough to address what it is committed to.  Climate change won’t wait for red tape delays.