The rulebook behind every carbon credit Ontoly issues
— and the reason buyers can trust it.
The Building Emissions Reduction Standard (BERS) Program is Ontoly's certification framework for building retrofit carbon credits. It defines exactly how a Building Emissions Reduction Unit (BERU) is calculated, verified, issued, transferred, and retired — so every credit on the Ontoly Registry is credible, transparent, and auditable, not just to us, but to any third party who checks.
BERS was built by a founding team with direct experience drafting carbon market standards, including Verra's submission to the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM) — the body that sets the global quality bar for carbon credits. The BERS Program is currently under review by both the ICVCM and CORSIA (the aviation industry's carbon offset framework), the two labels institutional buyers procure against.
Everything below is public. The documents on this page — governing standards, methodologies, policies, and reports — are the same materials our independent Governance Board, verifiers, and regulators use. If you're a building owner, verifier, or buyer, this is where you'll find the rules you're operating under.
The core rules of the program: the BERS Standard, which governs how emissions reductions are calculated and credited, and the Verification Standard, which sets out who can verify a project and how. Move the sliders to your project's annual reduction and a carbon-price assumption. The figure on the right is gross BERU revenue across a full 10-year issuance period.
The technical methodologies that translate a building retrofit into a verified tonne of CO₂e — covering energy efficiency and fuel switching today, with a defined process for adding new methodologies as the program grows.
The governance backbone: conflict-of-interest, KYC, anti-bribery, corrective actions, and a wind-down policy — the same categories of policy institutional buyers and regulators expect from any credible registry, published openly rather than held back.
Guidance for aligning BERUs with the two frameworks that unlock the largest pools of compliance demand: Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, and CORSIA, the aviation industry's carbon offsetting scheme.
Where the work actually happens: building owners, verifiers, and buyers submit data, track verification, and execute issuance, transfer, and retirement — all against the current, approved version of every BERS template and form.
A Building Emissions Reduction Unit is a carbon credit representing one tonne of CO2e reduced through a certified building retrofit — issued, tracked, and retired on the Ontoly Registry.
Every BERU is quantified from measured utility data, not models or estimates, and traces to a specific building and retrofit — no mega-project aggregation.
Building owners, managers, retrofit engineering firms, and consultants with eligible retrofit projects under the BERS Program. Check eligibility on the program page.
Voluntary offsetting, green building certification offsets (LEED v5, Zero Carbon Standard), and — subject to jurisdictional approval — compliance under emerging Building Performance Standards.
There's no fixed price — a project earns the number of BERUs it generates, at whatever price the Building Representative negotiates with a buyer. Quality signals like real metered performance and clear co-benefits command more, and note that our certification fees are charged to the buyer, so your listing price includes them.
