Biosphere Sustainable

We build sustainable models and certify good practices

+20 years promoting the culture of sustainability, under the principles and objectives of the United Nations

How we rate >

Frequently asked questions

Below are the answers to some of the most common questions.

Biosphere Sustainable

Biosphere Sustainable was created to facilitate the transition to sustainability for all societies around the world, with a transparent process that demonstrates how organisations are working towards a sustainable future and thus facilitating more responsible consumption decisions.

This portal is the solution for those who want to make more ethical and sustainable choices about their consumption. With more informed and aware societies, we make it easier for people's consumption decisions to reflect their values, achieving a real involvement of society to act more responsibly and adopt more sustainable models.

The Biosphere system was founded in 1997 by the Responsible Tourism Institute (RTI), by a group of academics, practitioners and sustainability experts, with an MOU with UNESCO, to convey the United Nations guidelines in an easy and adapted way to teach societies what to do, how to do it and how to measure it, to achieve lifestyles and models aligned with the global sustainability principles and goals.

Sustainability is not a state of being or not being; no person, company or entity will ever be able to carry out its activity in a 100% sustainable way. But it is possible to adopt good practices and more responsible models.

At Biosphere we recognise and share the sustainable efforts that companies and destinations in our community do make, and we give them the tools and knowledge they need to continue to improve and implement more responsible practices, so that the path towards sustainability is continuous.

If practices less aligned with sustainable principles and objectives are detected in our community, we provide the guidelines and tools to monitor, compensate, minimise and transform their actions with more sustainable models to redirect their activity.

Finder

When you search for an entity, Biosphere first highlights those that carry out the most comprehensive actions in sustainability, according to the good practices they have worked on and demonstrated in our system, in accordance with the objectives and goals of the United Nations.

You can search for the typology you are most interested in, in a specific place, and then refine your search to limit it to entities that have the elements you value most for your responsible consumption; that support environmental projects, that have their own organic garden, that have charging points for electric vehicles, among 27 other attributes. You will be able to filter and find entities that Match your preferences in different categories: accessibility, food and drink, climate change, environment, entertainment, mobility and local support.

The Biosphere system takes into account the commitments and public initiatives of the entities with respect to the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) of the United Nations, and rewards this interest and commitment by offering a first "Committed" badge.  However, at this first level, the commitments and actions marked in the entity's plan have not been demonstrated and verified by the team of independent professionals, so they are not enabled on the website as their veracity cannot be guaranteed. Once they have been audited and verified, the information is enabled in the profile and the entity's status advances to the Biosphere Certified level.

If you are looking for a specific company or destination but cannot find them on this website, it is because they are not part of the Biosphere community. This portal gathers the available information of the entities that voluntarily decide to manage and recognise their sustainability with the Biosphere certification methodology.

If you want to see your favourite organisations on this website to learn about their good practices, ask them to work on their sustainability and recognise their efforts with Biosphere. With a real request for information and transparency on good corporate and institutional practices, you can achieve great changes in the production and consumption patterns of companies and destinations.

Spread the word: the more people we can get using Biosphere Sustainable, the more impact we can create together! Send your friends and relatives this link. so they can access our website from any electronic device.

Tell us what you think: follow us on social media and share your comments about the website and the best practices of our Biosphere community, make suggestions for new ways to help users like you find ethical and more sustainable consumption choices, share with the rest of the network how you think we could improve as humanity to be more sustainable, give feedback.

Businesses and destinations

No. Thanks to the versatility and adaptability of the Biosphere methodology, this system and its management and certification platform is suitable for all types of sectors and typologies.

Given the history of more than 25 years of experience helping, originally, tourism professionals around the world, today, Biosphere has been able to evolve and adapt its methodology and tools to help SMEs, large business groups and chains of any sector, to manage and recognise their good practices and sustainable efforts, at their own pace and according to their productive reality and resources.

Biosphere is not only a platform and methodology suitable for more than 27 different types of companies of any size, but it is also available to offer management and certification services in up to 7 different languages: Spanish, English, French, German, Catalan, Chinese and Portuguese.

Thanks to the design of the Biosphere platform, the corporative of a chain or business group can have control and visualisation of all its business units that manage sustainability with Biosphere Sustainable.

Biosphere works in such a way that each business unit carries out its own personalised corporate sustainability management and recognition plan (being able to use common evidence from all the business units such as corporate protocols adopted by all the units), so that each entity must subscribe individually and pass its own annual audit process 100% online, obtaining certification for each of the entity or business units that comprise the group or chain, and not as a single entity subscribed as a corporate. 

This is the only way to guarantee the verification of individual and effective sustainable practices and efforts, truly implemented in each unit of the group or chain, highlighting and demonstrating how each entity of a whole group works towards sustainability, evaluating and monitoring that all of them adopt sustainability models.

Only by knowing the effort behind companies' labels can we increase social responsibility and drive better outcomes for people and the planet. Consumers have a right to know how the activities of companies and destinations affect the issues they care about.

That is why Biosphere entity profiles take into account real and verified information on the actions they actually take, in line with the 2030 Agenda. Thus, we give value to the real efforts of the entities, independently endorsed, and we combine them with United Nations indicators, to measure and verify how they progress and comply with the 169 goals and 17 Sustainable Development Goals of the 2030 Agenda.

If you are a business that would like to be listed on Biosphere Sustainable, please first review our "Businesses" page, and if you wish to proceed use the registration and contact forms on that website to stard the process.

If you are a territory manager or technician that would like your destination to be listed on Biosphere Sustainable, please review our "Destinations" page and use the registration and contact forms on that website to stard the process.