Guidance for the Identification of Impacts and Indicators for Activity Level SDG Impact Reporting

Who’s behind it? – Gold Standard

How can it help? – This document presents guidance for climate action projects to identify SDG impacts and monitoring indicators for meaningful and credible performance reporting. It uses a principles-based approach to facilitate SDG impact and indicator identification and informs the development of project-specific SDG tools that can report on project impact in a consistent and structured way.

While Gold Standard stakeholders are likely most interested in the tools applicable in project development in carbon markets, the guidance can inform impact assessment of climate impact more broadly.

Project developers: Capture the full impact of your project more simply, with consistent indicators per activity type that are easier to monitor over time.

Civil society and other market participants: Put simply, market credibility. Consistent, comparable, and credible SDG impact reporting demonstrates the value-add of robust climate action and can strengthen carbon markets.

Carbon credit buyers: Gain confidence on objective comparisons of project performance – avoiding the risk of overclaiming what your investment has achieved – and benefit from new impact visualization tools in development.