Quality is a concept that has accompanied civilization since its origin, adjusting to each particular society and playing an increasingly important role in the survival of public and private organizations. This has led to the use of international quality standards to control and improve the results of production processes, to differentiate products and increase productivity, guaranteeing quality, safety and trust in processes and products. Costa Rica has been a pioneer in the region, creating with Law No. 8279 a National System for Quality, which includes the Institute of Technical Standards of Costa Rica (INTECO), the Technical Regulation Body (ORT), the Costa Rican Laboratory of Metrology (LACOMET) and the Costa Rican Accreditation Body (ECA). This law designates the ECA as the only competent entity to carry out evaluation and accreditation processes in the country.

Within the National System for Quality, accreditation is a mechanism that supports the creation of conformity assessment schemes, voluntary or regulatory, in the private, public and academic sectors, through regulations, decrees and voluntary standards that establish the criteria and Requirements that must be met by companies and organizations of all kinds that wish to demonstrate that they comply with the quality of the good or service they produce.

ECA evaluates and accredits the conformity assessment bodies that supervise and evaluate compliance with said provisions, within a system of trust, quality and transparency. And, in turn, ECA is evaluated by the International Accreditation Forum (IAF), the Inter-American Accreditation Cooperation (IAAC) and the Inter-American Laboratory Accreditation Cooperation (ILAC), to demonstrate competence as an accreditation body. according to ISO 17011. Due to its excellent performance in evaluations with international peers, ECA's work is recognized worldwide, which allows it to be a signatory of multilateral recognition agreements between the members of the mentioned entities. These multilateral agreements ensure that the results of a laboratory, an inspection, a certification, a validation or an accredited verification are valid throughout the world. By having multilateral recognition, ECA currently accredits conformity assessment bodies in Honduras and the Dominican Republic.

In 2007, Costa Rica announced to the world its goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2021, joining the global efforts to reduce carbon emissions in production processes. Based on this, the need arose to have sufficiently competent organizations in the technical sphere to reliably evaluate the actions of quantification, reduction and removal of emissions undertaken by companies or projects, to guarantee that those actions were carried out with technical correctness and transparency. , and adjusted to the principles and requirements of international norms and standards. These types of conformity assessment bodies are greenhouse gas validating / verifying bodies (OVA /; or V / VB for its acronym in English).

In response to this need, ECA set itself the objective of developing a voluntary conformity assessment scheme for the granting of a C-Neutral seal to companies in Costa Rica.