Navigating and Using Our Standard
Our Community Inclusion Standard (CIS) is intended to be a useful tool and resource for anyone delivering nature-based projects and seeking to engage with and include communities in their design and achieve social impacts.
It is applicable across the whole of the United Kingdom (UK) and allows professional verification and certification of a project's engagement and inclusion activity.
Verification and certification can be achieved at 2 levels:
Basic: Community Engagement & Inclusion
- To align with our basic level, project developers are encouraged to follow the our Community Inclusion Best Practice Guide, primarily authored by Deciding Matters, following a co-design process.
Explore a selection of place-based case studies which demonstrate best practice in community inclusion
Enhanced: Community Benefits from Natural Capital Investment
- To align with our enhanced level, project developers are encouraged to follow both our Best Practice Guide and our Community Benefits Route Map, that is hosted and maintained by our partner the Scottish Land Commission.
Both of these guides are helpful to structure activity that might pre-date any decision to register the project under a BSI Compliant UK Scheme or Code.
We encourage such early application of our guides, as decisions around accessing natural capital markets would ideally involve and be guided by the community.
If you are a certification body, verification organisation or nature credits scheme, then the Community Inclusion Standard Certification Criteria are of high relevance. These open source criteria have been designed to allow them to be directly integrated into other third party certification processes.
Together, we trust that our published guides and criteria avoid duplicated effort, achieve greater alignment and consistency of approaches to nature-based projects across the UK and support the development of a high integrity project pipeline for the UK Natural Capital Markets. For further context please visit the the BSI UK Nature Investments Standards Programme.
This project has been supported by The Facility for Investment Ready Nature in Scotland , delivered by NatureScot in collaboration with The Scottish Government and in partnership with the National Lottery Heritage Fund
