Standard development
Integrating social, biodiversity and carbon values in the conservation, protection and restoration of Natural Forests
Natural Forest Standard
Focusing on a streamlined, credible standard for quantifying the ecosystem benefits of Natural Forest projects
About Us
Creating a Standard that recognises the importance of the world’s ecosystems and the ecologically-significant value they hold
Ecosystem Certification Organisation (ECO) has worked with industry specialists to develop the Natural Forest Standard (NFS). This is an efficient, accessible and scientifically-robust Standard to certify the integrated carbon,
social and biodiversity values of natural forests at risk from deforestation and degradation.
The NFS includes unique features that are specifically designed to give it distinctiveness within the market and includes:
risk-based Approach
Unified risk-based performance benchmark approach for consistent and comparable baseline calculations
Integrated Biodiversity Value
Normative Biodiversity Metric for assessing the biodiversity value and significance of project areas
Specifically-designed
Designed and developed specifically for medium to large-scale natural forest and non-commercial forest projects
ISO Framework-Compatible
ISO 14064-3 and ISO 14065 compatible for project-level validation and verification for authenticating the carbon assertions and project benefits
Latest News
~ 11th July 2022 ~
Agreement in place for the expansion of the NFS
Ecosystem Certification Organisation (ECO) is pleased to announce an agreement with Resilience Constellation Management Ltd to expand the Natural Forest Standard and establish it as a widely recognised system for crediting the avoided CO2 emissions and removals from the protection and restoration of natural forests.
Dr Richard Tipper, MBE, CEO of Resilience Constellation, said: “CO2 emissions from the loss and degradation of tropical forests are similar in scale to the fossil fuel emissions from all EU countries. The Natural Forest Standard, with its focus on jurisdictional-scale protection and restoration of natural forests and its use of transparent geospatial datasets for baseline setting and monitoring, is a strong platform to enable the scaling of effective finance from environmental credit markets.”
Vicky Kelly of ECO said: “The Natural Forest Standard has had proven success in Amazonia, where the first municipal project set up under the standard has achieved one of the best records of avoiding deforestation across the Brazilian Amazon.”
Standard Documentation
There are a number of documents available for the Natural Forest Standard.
Further documents can be found in the documentation download section of the NFS website
NFS standard
This document sets out the normative requirements for projects working in alignment with the Natural Forest Standard for the validation, monitoring and verification of projects
NFS Guidance
The Guidance document is available to assist developers in meeting the requirements of the Natural Forest Standard, and for verifiers to assess the conformity of projects to the Standard
NFS Methodology
NFS Methodology 001.1b is a risk-based methodology for quantifying the Natural Capital Credits issued to projects operating under the Natural Forest Standard, for application in Amazonia