ACT014 FIRNS Project Standard and Integrity Charter

Description

ACT, on behalf of the Alliance for Scotland’s Rainforest (ASR), is looking to appoint an external consultant to facilitate the development of a Project Standard to inform the design parameters of ASR landscape-scale rainforest restoration projects; and an Integrity Charter setting out the criteria which investors and buyers of ecosystem services from those projects must meet to align with ASR’s principles, contributing to the investment readiness of Scotland’s rainforest restoration. Our ambition is to increase the scale and pace of Scotland’s rainforest restoration by overcoming two primary barriers to funding: fragmented landownership and lack of private finance investment. These are complex barriers to overcome and will require significant interaction between landowners, investors, buyers, communities, and delivery partners - to ensure any future market mechanism works for all concerned by ensuring delivery of co-benefits and increasing the confidence of project stakeholders. To facilitate this, ASR’s FIRNS project will begin by developing a Project Standards and Integrity Charter, as a basis for these interactions. We will then use this engagement to iteratively develop a business model and governance approach to begin to answer some of the fundamental questions set out above, one which can later be aggregated into a pipeline of projects from multiple organisations.