Introducing Keystone 3.0: Earthly’s framework for trusted nature investment

Keystone 3.0 is Earthly’s next-generation nature projects assessment framework, designed to help businesses identify high-integrity carbon credits, biodiversity credits, and wider nature-based solutions. It strengthens how projects are evaluated across carbon, biodiversity, and people, ensuring investment supports measurable, lasting benefits for ecosystems and communities.

TL;DR - Key takeaways

If you’ve ever struggled to know which nature-based projects truly deliver, you’re not alone. As more organisations look to invest in nature, to reach climate goals, support biodiversity, or engage employees and customers, one question keeps coming up:

How can we be sure our investment is making a real difference?

The truth is, not all nature projects live up to their promises. Some lack data. Others overclaim. And too many fail to show how people and ecosystems actually benefit.

That’s why we built

Keystone 3.0: the latest evolution of the Earthly assessment

.

Keystone 3.0 is Earthly’s rigorous integrity assessment for nature-based solutions, ensuring that carbon and biodiversity investments are grounded in credible baselines, additionality, robust monitoring, and lasting benefits for ecosystems and communities.

Over the past year, Earthly's Research Team has transformed our assessment to create Keystone 3.0, the next generation of our assessment framework and a major step forward in how quality is defined. 

It is built around three core goals: to become more holistic, better adapted to different social contexts, and more rigorous: 

Nature-based solutions are not defined by a single model or market, and our assessment framework shouldn’t be either. Keystone 3.0 expands beyond assessing carbon credits to embrace a wider spectrum of nature-based solutions, including biodiversity credits, tree planting programmes, and innovation projects. This evolution enables us to evaluate projects that previously fell outside our scope, such as beaver reintroduction, native oyster restoration, and kelp forest recovery, but still support critical ecological processes that are important to finance and scale. 

Keystone 3.0 achieves this breadth by tailoring its criteria to each project type and context, ensuring that measures of quality remain both rigorous and relevant. Crucially, it is registry and project-type agnostic, assessing projects based on their intrinsic quality and impact, rather than their registry affiliation or category of nature-based solution. 

By widening our lens, we unlock new opportunities to guide investment towards a broader range of projects that restore nature with integrity. 

According to WWF’s Living Planet Report, monitored wildlife populations have declined by an average of

73%

since 1970, showing the scale and urgency of global biodiversity loss. The biodiversity crisis is as urgent as the climate crisis, which is why Earthly is proud to offer high-quality, voluntary biodiversity credits, enabling businesses to support nature restoration directly.

Biodiversity credits are measurable units that represent verified investments in habitat restoration and ecosystem recovery.

Each credit represents a defined area within a project where targeted actions are taking place. But biodiversity is inherently complex and interconnected, making it challenging to measure, monitor, and evaluate. 

To meet that challenge, Keystone 3.0 introduces Earthly’s first dedicated Biodiversity Credit Assessment, a framework built to evaluate both ecological integrity and long-term resilience.

This framework examines three key dimensions: 

Together, these dimensions form a holistic, science-based framework that can be applied across diverse restoration types, ecosystem conditions, and geographies worldwide.

The UN estimates that effective nature and climate solutions must include

indigenous and local community rights

, as these groups protect a significant share of global biodiversity.

Earthly projects span diverse regions around the world, each with its own social realities. Land tenure, livelihoods, and community structures vary widely, meaning that a “one-size-fits-all” approach to assessing the People pillar risks overlooking what truly defines success. Understanding the local social context is therefore essential, as it shapes what quality and impact look like on the ground. 

A project in an area with limited access to education, for instance, might contribute most meaningfully by strengthening local education systems directly. In contrast, a project where education is already well established might focus on environmental awareness and conservation education instead. The benchmark for quality is never universal; it must be rooted in relevance. 

To ensure this, Keystone 3.0 now requires every Earthly assessor to conduct an independent contextual analysis before scoring a project. This includes:

By grounding every assessment in its local social context, Keystone 3.0 ensures that evaluations are fair, culturally relevant, and genuinely equitable.

Social contexts vary across projects, depending on the location, restoration activity, land tenure systems, and local socio-economic conditions. 

The International Emissions Trading Association’s updated VCM Guidelines 2.0

outline clear principles designed to build confidence in verified carbon credits by ensuring only high-quality credits are used and that credit use is transparently accounted for and disclosed. This emphasis on transparency and clear evidence enables organisations to integrate carbon credits into climate strategies with greater confidence and reduces the risk of reputational concerns that can slow investment.

Keystone 3.0 is raising the standard for project quality across every dimension, expanding its scope with new sections and indicators that strengthen how we evaluate project quality across the three pillars of carbon, biodiversity, and people. 

Carbon remains one of the three cornerstones of our analysis, and we have significantly strengthened how we assess and verify carbon performance across all project types:

For sustainability teams, investing in nature supports climate goals, contributes to biodiversity recovery, and engages stakeholders. But navigating carbon credits, biodiversity credits, and nature restoration projects is complex - and the risks of low-quality or poorly evidenced projects can create hesitation.

Keystone 3.0 helps businesses overcome these challenges by providing a clear, science-based way to identify high-integrity nature projects that deliver measurable impact.

Through Earthly’s assessment, businesses can:

Keystone 3.0 enables businesses to move beyond uncertainty and direct funding toward nature restoration with integrity - helping ensure contributions create lasting value for the planet and the people who depend on it.

Through our experience assessing and working with nature projects across different ecosystems, geographies, and social contexts, we’ve seen firsthand how important rigorous, transparent evaluation is to delivering real impact. 

The Earthly Assessment is a living framework, continuously evolving as knowledge improves and nature-based solutions grow and diversify. By refining how we measure quality and impact across different types of projects, Keystone 3.0 marks another important step in our mission to channel funding toward the projects that regenerate the planet, for nature and for people.

You can now explore Keystone 3.0 in more depth:

What is Keystone 3.0?

Keystone 3.0 is Earthly’s latest assessment framework for evaluating carbon credits, biodiversity credits, and wider nature-based solutions with scientific rigour.

How does Keystone 3.0 improve integrity in nature projects?

Keystone 3.0 strengthens baseline testing, additionality checks, leakage analysis, monitoring, and permanence evaluation to ensure projects deliver real outcomes.

Does Keystone 3.0 assess biodiversity credits?

Yes, Keystone 3.0 introduces Earthly’s first dedicated Biodiversity Credit Assessment focused on suitability, monitoring, and resilience.

Why is context-specific assessment important

Context-specific assessment for nature-based projects is important because social realities vary widely. Keystone 3.0 embeds local contextual analysis to ensure projects are equitable, culturally relevant, and impactful.

Who should use Keystone 3.0?

Sustainability professionals and organisations seeking high-quality, high-impact nature projects for carbon offsetting, biodiversity investment, or stakeh