The Biosphere Certification Scheme
Biosphere is the certification scheme of the Responsible Tourism Institute (RTI), a body founded in 1997 under a founding memorandum of understanding with UNESCO to promote sustainability in the tourism sector. As the owner of this scheme, the RTI focuses its work on developing, reviewing and updating the criteria of the Biosphere Scheme, and entrusts the assessment of compliance to a separate and independent body, unrelated to the drafting of the standard.
Biosphere Certification
Biosphere Responsible Tourism, S.L. (BRT) is the certification body that, since 1998, has independently assessed compliance with the Biosphere scheme, accompanying companies and destinations in their continuous improvement process towards sustainability.
BRT's certification processes are third-party, with external and independent audits, and follow the principles of competence, consistency and impartiality that the ISO/IEC 17065 standard requires of those who apply it. At BRT we offer our certification services in 7 languages and 100% online, with coverage for companies of different types —hotels, restaurants, museums, among others— and for tourism-territorial management bodies, which in this repository we call «destinations». Currently, the certification services offered by BRT are for the Biosphere scheme.
To carry out the certification processes online, BRT has designed its own Biosphere Sustainable platform; a virtual system where each entity interested in becoming certified registers its profile and completes its certification process autonomously. There it can consult at any time the information and documentation on its good practices, aligned with the 17 SDGs and the 169 targets of the United Nations, and receive, 100% online, the external audits needed to verify them.
Once its documented actions have been verified, BRT reports them in this public web repository, which lists all entities with a certification in force, so that anyone interested can consult the verified actions, the validity period and scope of the certificate, and the rest of the information of interest regarding the certifications issued by this body.
Our tools:
Behind every Biosphere certification issued by BRT there is a community that keeps growing: thousands of entities worldwide trust the tools and services of Biosphere Responsible Tourism to document and verify their good practices through external audits, in order to communicate them once verified and together with their certificate informa
- Biosphere Sustainable Platform: This is the tool we have designed at BRT so that each company or tourism-territorial management body can manage its own certification process: create your profile, upload the evidence of your good practices and receive your external audits, all 100 % online and in 7 languages. If you are part of a chain or a group, the platform allows you to manage the certification of each establishment individually from a centralised corporate dashboard, with features designed to work with all the information from a single place.
- This web repository: Once certification has been achieved, the entity's profile becomes part of this public repository, where anyone interested —end consumers, partners, suppliers— can consult the verified actions, the validity and the scope of the certificate. In this way, the documented and verified work of each organisation stops being internal data and becomes public information accessible to anyone looking for it.