“Over the years we’ve invested significantly in our field data team - focusing on producing trusted ratings. While this ensures the accuracy of our Ratings, it doesn’t allow the scale across the thousands of projects that buyers are considering.”
For more information on carbon credit procurement trends, read our "Key Takeaways for 2025" article. We share five, data-backed tips to improve your procurement strategy.
One more thing: Connect to Supply customers also get access to the rest of Sylvera's tools. That means you can easily see project ratings and evaluate an individual project's strengths, procure quality carbon credits, and even monitor project activity (particularly if you’ve invested at the pre-issuance stage.)
Book a free demo of Sylvera to see our platform's procurement and reporting features in action.
The voluntary carbon markets have grown significantly in recent years, driven by corporate net zero commitments and a growing awareness of climate change.
But as demand for carbon credits has surged, so has scrutiny. Headlines question whether projects deliver real climate action. Financial institutions demand evidence that credits reflect genuine greenhouse gas emissions reductions. Local communities push back - clearly demonstrated at COP30 in Brazil - when projects cause environmental and social harm or fail to deliver promised benefits.
At the center of these conversations sits one concept: integrity. It's a term thrown around constantly in carbon markets, yet not always fully understood. For those wanting to support credible climate action, understanding what integrity means—and why it matters—is essential.
Why Integrity Matters (And Why the Term Is So Confusing)
"Integrity" is a buzzword in voluntary carbon markets. But finding two people who define it the same way is surprisingly difficult. Some focus on methodological rigor. Others emphasize transparency. Still others point to community benefits or biodiversity outcomes.
Why does integrity matter? Three reasons stand out: confidence, accountability, and real-world impact. Buyers need confidence that the credits they purchase represent genuine carbon emissions reductions. Stakeholders, from regulators to investors to the public, demand accountability for climate claims. And most importantly, the planet needs real climate action, not paper offsets that look good on a spreadsheet but don't actually reduce or remove GHG emissions.
The integrity problem manifests in multiple ways: competing definitions across standards, inconsistent data quality, and a lack of comparable signals. What's changing is the emergence of frameworks and initiatives pushing for verifiable, comparable integrity standards.
The Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM) has established Core Carbon Principles. Major carbon crediting programs are tightening their methodologies. Corporate reporting frameworks like the CSRD and SBTi are raising the bar for what counts as credible climate action under the Paris Agreement. All in an attempt to bring clarity to this issue.
A Clear Definition of Carbon Credit Integrity
A carbon credit has integrity if it represents real, additional, measurable, durable, and a verified tonne of CO2e reduction or removal, without double counting or misleading claims.
Integrity covers the full lifecycle of a carbon credit: project design, MRV, validation and verification by third parties, credit issuance through registries, and finally, the claims made when credits are retired. A weakness at any stage undermines the whole chain.
This is where independent evaluation comes in. Registries ensure procedural compliance, but they don't compare project quality across methodologies or assess relative risk and performance. Independent ratings, however, translate broad and complex project data into actionable insights.
5 Pillars of High-Integrity Carbon Credits
To understand integrity, you must break it down to its core components. These five pillars provide a framework to evaluate if a carbon project generates high-quality carbon credits.
1. Additionality
A project is additional if its climate impact wouldn't have happened without carbon market revenues. This requires project developers to prove that the project faced either policy barriers or financial hurdles that carbon credit sales helped overcome.
Common problems include overstated baselines that make projects look more impactful than they are, and credits issued for activities that would have happened due to existing policies.
2. Permanence
Carbon reductions need to last.
To assess projects for permanence, assess reversal risks, evaluate buffer pools—reserve credits set aside to cover potential losses—and investigate long-term liability coverage.
Also, different project types face different time horizons. Protecting existing forests carries different permanence considerations than engineered carbon removal, for example. As such, you need to consider project type when you look for high-integrity carbon credits.
3. Carbon Accounting
Did the project actually reduce carbon emissions? If so, by how much?
To answer this question, a project needs to use transparent methodologies and offer clear uncertainty ranges to ensure accuracy and avoid double counting.
High-integrity projects use verifiable data through comprehensive MRV systems. They also conduct periodic remeasurement to confirm that project outcomes match predictions.
4. Co-Benefits
High-integrity projects follow "do no harm" principles.
This means obtaining free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) from local communities, protecting biodiversity, and ensuring fair and equitable treatment of stakeholders.
Projects should generate carbon credits while creating benefits—or at minimum, avoiding harm—for people and ecosystems. If they don't, they can't produce high-integrity carbon credits.
5. Transparency and Claims
The final pillar connects project performance to corporate communications. Do the claims made about the carbon credits align with what was actually verified by an independent entity?
High-integrity markets depend on conservative, accurate claims that maintain trust with stakeholders and support credible climate action. Transparency is critical to integrity.
High-Integrity vs Low-Integrity Credits — The Key Differences
How Integrity Differs by Project Type
Integrity standards must adapt to different carbon project types.
Nature-based projects, like REDD+, ARR, and IFM, face challenges due to baseline quality, carbon leakage, and the frequency and accuracy of project monitoring. Meanwhile, soil carbon and agricultural projects struggle with sampling uncertainty and permanence issues.
Technology-based carbon dioxide removal projects, including biochar, DACCS, BECCS, and mineralization, typically feature metered capture that's easier to verify. As such, key integrity questions focus more on energy sources and long-term storage liability.
Then there are energy and industrial reduction projects that must address rebound risks, accurate metering of actual reductions, and additionality challenges.
A Quick Buyer Checklist for Integrity
Before you purchase carbon credits, ask yourself these questions to help you prioritize measurable emissions reductions and improve market integrity.
- Can you see the project baseline and uncertainty disclosure?
- Is additionality clearly proven and documented?
- Are reversal and permanence risks managed transparently?
- Has the project been independently rated or reviewed?
- Are safeguards and stakeholder benefits demonstrated?
- Are corporate claims aligned with verification and retirements?
Why Integrity Pays Off in Carbon Markets
Investing in high-integrity carbon credits has tangible business benefits.
Better quality means lower reputational risk. As scrutiny of carbon markets intensifies, companies caught using low-quality credits often face serious damage to their credibility.
More reliable credits also deliver stronger long-term pricing power. How so? Integrity drives confidence among regulators, investors, and customers who increasingly understand the difference between genuine climate impact and greenwashing practices.
In addition, corporate reporting requirements have tightened. Frameworks like the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), SEC climate disclosure rules, and the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) demand stronger evidence and assurance alignment. High-quality carbon credits that can stand up to scrutiny are strategic assets.
How Sylvera Helps Meet Core Carbon Principles
Navigating integrity across thousands of carbon projects requires trustworthy data.
Sylvera provides independent carbon credit ratings on a scale from D to AAA, helping users evaluate project quality without bias, as we're not beholden to any project developer.
Our Ratings are based on three core pillars—carbon, additionality, and permanence—with scores in each category combined to create a holistic rating. We then deploy advanced technology, satellite imagery, and proprietary field data to verify the accuracy of project reports.
For forestry projects specifically, we’ve developed Biomass Atlas—the world's most accurate biomass data built on $10M+ in proprietary Multi-Scale LiDAR field research across 250,000+ hectares. This ensures our findings are based on independent, defensible carbon stock data.
Beyond individual project ratings, Sylvera offers Methodology Profiles that outline integrity drivers by project category. This helps buyers understand the risks of different project types. As such, our platform helps facilitate efficient market participation for many companies.
Then there's Sylvera's Market Intelligence offering, which connects quality ratings insights to price and demand trends in a single view, including spot price estimates for over 20,000 credits and supply-demand outlooks to 2050. This combination of quality assessment and market data helps buyers make decisions that balance carbon credit integrity with cost-effectiveness.
At the end of the day, Sylvera provides clear, evidence-based visibility for smarter investment and procurement. It's exactly what's needed as high-integrity carbon markets mature and buyers seek to purchase carbon credits that meet credible atmospheric integrity standards.
Request a demo of Sylvera today to see how our platform can help you hit your net-zero goals, build a stronger reputation in the market place, and otherwise address climate change.
