We cannot wait on quality. We cannot keep doing the same things in nature-based projects and expect better results in the market. Individually as project developers, we cannot expect to deliver quality alone. But collectively, we can be part of the solution – if someone shows us the path.

To truly demonstrate quality, nature-based project proponents and their stakeholders need a way to design good projects and to show the full story of their good projects using objective, transparent data.

For carbon buyers on their paths to net zero, the first step is reducing their own emissions across all scopes. Nobody disagrees on that. More than a third of the world’s largest publicly traded companies have publicly committed to net-zero targets. And while a portion of these targets can be met through corporate reduction and insetting, there will always be a residual portion that must be offset, known as using carbon credits. Carbon credits are a key necessity to a decarbonized economy—but they must be done right. 

But credit buyers see risk in publicly claiming offsets.  With each transaction of a nature-based credit, communities in which projects occur expect to realize meaningful impact for their commitments, both in terms of climate outcomes but also promised co-benefits.  The risk is finding failed impact which equals negative publicity. Buyers are sensitive to this risk, and want deeper assurances of additionality, transparency and durability as well for the same reason. What credit buyers want, project investors want too.  

Investing in the carbon market can be more challenging when it involves a commitment to creating these positive impacts under a watchful public eye that is losing patience. And yet, market demand continues to outpace supply with some projections indicating 50-fold growth within the next 10 years, from $2 billion just two years ago to $100 billion by 2030. And so there exists a terrifying parallel between a rapid scale of capital commitments are the still lack accountability for quality, credibility, and transparency.

Many players in the market are jockeying for position as taste testers of quality, but none are doing the hard work of forging the path to quality improvement. There is tremendous momentum led by the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Markets initiative (ICVCM), and registries and standards bodies like VERRA, Gold Standard, Climate Action Reserve, Puro.Earth. There are evolving principles being developed and deployed like the ICVCM Core Carbon Principles and the Oxford Net Zero-Aligned Offsetting Principles. There are verifiers like SCS Global Services and DNV who claim to issue quality stamps. There are marketplaces like MSCI, 3Degrees, Flow Carbon, and Salesforce which apply disunified lenses for testing quality. And there are ratings agencies trying to compete with each other for the best rubrics: BeZero, Calyx, and Sylvera.

All of these players exist to promote quality but they all point to different sets of rules, differing and subjective assessment methodologies, save-the-day satellites solutions and opaque black-boxes.  The fundamental problem is that they don’t really do the hard work of guiding the fundamental behavior of how to get to good in nature-based carbon to ensure market confidence.  It’s easy to position oneself as an arbiter of quality by ones own measures, but it’s an entirely different exercise to show someone the path to delivering quality that credit buyers and investors trust.