British Standards Institute - BSI Flex

The BSI, in collaboration with leading experts, has developed a series of standards and overarching principles to support high integrity UK nature markets.  Published in March 2025 Flex 701 acting as the Overall Principles for UK Nature Markets aimed at providing the framework for ensuring high-integrity for all nature market projects in the UK. These include being transparent, good governance, and delivering real environmental benefits.  As part of this work in autumn last year, BSI launched an Early Adopter pilot programme organisations to trial the standards in practice and contribute feedback to help refine and strengthen them, more than 50 organisations applied, and  IUCN UK Peatland Programme Peatland Code was successful in being selected as one of the early adopters. 

Pilot:

The Peatland Code's assessment against the draft Flex 701 standard was completed in December 2025 through this process the Peatland Code team worked with the BSI team over a series of structured days with a dedicated feedback session. The Code shows strong overall alignment with only a few gaps identified which are largely related to the way in which Flex 701 is set out and worded.

In particular, the areas highlighted that the Peatland Code demonstrates strength in:

• Quantification methodologies and scientific robustness
• Governance structure and impartiality
• Validation, verification and additionality controls
• Registry governance and credit lifecycle controls
• Stakeholder engagement requirements  

We will continue to work with the BSI team as the pilot concludes and look forward to working towards future accreditation under this critical standard for UK nature markets.