“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.
A carbon Rating is ultimately an opinion about risk. But there are different ways a Rating agency can arrive at that opinion, and it’s important the market understands the different approaches, so stakeholders can ask which one to trust.
The best way to tell is to look. A credible Rating process is one you can open up, read and test for yourself.
Approach 1: a fixed, published framework, reviewed by external experts through open consultation, decides the outcome, and analysts apply it. The same project, assessed on the same evidence, gets the same Rating, whoever is doing the assessing.
Approach 2: a group of analysts review the evidence and discuss it, then agree on a letter. The Rating reflects their judgement in the room, on the day.
Both approaches involve expertise. But only one of them is repeatable, auditable, and independent of who happens to be on the call. As regulation starts to formalise what a credible Rating process looks like, that distinction is becoming increasingly important.
And, when every Rating comes from the same fixed, standardised framework, Ratings can be compared with one another, because every project of a given type is held to the same test. When Ratings rest on judgement calls instead, there’s nothing to say one group of analysts wouldn’t have judged the same project differently from another, so the Ratings can’t be reliably compared, across projects or over time.
That’s also why transparency matters so much. We’ve long believed the market is better off when it’s clear how Ratings are made, and we’ve now taken a big step further: our frameworks are published in our updated Resource Hub, which is open so anyone can explore exactly how we rate, project type by project type.
View the Resource Hub here to explore the Sylvera Ratings frameworks.
What regulation actually asks for
The EU's ESG Ratings Regulation requires the methodology behind Ratings to be, in its own words, "rigorous, systematic, independent and capable of justification."
Rigorous and systematic jar with an approach where the outcome depends on which analysts happen to be in the room that week.
Independent rules out a process where the same people setting the score are also the ones talking to the client who's paying for it.
In terms of independence - close, direct contact with a developer and its project, for example through site visits, can make full neutrality harder to maintain, however good the intentions. Rather the evidence does the talking: independent data, satellite evidence and documentation, assessed against a fixed framework.
Capable of justification means a Rating needs to be explainable after the fact, not just defensible by the person who made the call.
The regulation also puts a strong emphasis on transparency, requiring providers to disclose their methodologies and key assumptions publicly. A Rating process that can be read, checked and challenged is exactly what that points to.
That's a useful test to apply to any Rating agency, including us. The simplest way to apply it is to read the methodology yourself, which is why we’ve made ours easy to find and explore.
Two approaches, in practice
1. Framework-led.
One published framework per project type. A strong score on one pillar can't offset a weak one elsewhere, and the same evidence produces the same Rating regardless of who applies it.
Our frameworks are published in full, including the scoring matrices, so you can see what’s tested, how each pillar is weighted, and how the pieces combine into a letter. Every Rating carries the version of the framework it was assessed under, with a timestamped changelog.
Every new or materially amended framework also goes through our Framework Review Committee (FRC), an open consultation with external experts. That’s how we test each framework against market and scientific consensus, rather than relying on our own in-house expert view alone. We’re the only carbon Ratings provider to run open consultations like this on our frameworks.
Where judgment is needed, it happens inside the framework itself, not on the day a Rating is issued, and any deviation is documented and escalated for review.
Analysts are trained extensively (Sylvera's onboarding runs to 150 hours before anyone works on a live Rating), but their job is to apply the rules consistently, not to set the outcome from scratch each time.
2. Judgement-led.
A model or set of indicators produces an initial view, and a committee then sets the final letter "with reference to" that view, a step that typically sits outside the published methodology. If the final step isn’t documented, there’s nothing for a buyer or developer to check it against.
Because the outcome depends on a specific group of people reaching consensus on a specific day, two things follow: it's harder to audit after the fact (can the room reconstruct, months later, exactly why a judgement call went the way it did?), and it's more sensitive to change (new analysts, a different committee, a change in leadership can all shift how the same evidence gets read).
Neither is inherently less expert. But only one of them produces a Rating that means the same thing regardless of who's applying the framework, which is a large part of what "systematic" and "capable of justification" are actually asking for.
The approaches side-by-side
Why this matters for buyers
If you're relying on a Rating to make a procurement decision, you're trusting that the letter reflects the evidence, not who’s in a room at a given time.
A framework-led Rating gives you something to check: the published methodology, the scoring matrix, the version it was assessed under. A judgement-led Rating asks you to trust a process that, by its own design, isn't fully reconstructable after the fact.
It also means the Rating should hold up over time. A framework doesn't get a new hire, go on leave, or leave the company. If the durability of a Rating matters to you (and if you're making multi-year decisions off the back of one, it should), that's worth asking about directly.
This matters especially because projects change over time. When a project’s Rating moves, you want to know the movement reflects a real change in the project, not simply a different group of analysts in the room. With a fixed framework and a timestamped changelog, you can see exactly what changed and why. For more on how Ratings relate to the vintage you’re buying, see our guide here.
And in terms of transparency - when you can read the framework behind a Rating, you can ask sharper questions of it, compare Ratings on a like-for-like basis, and explain your decisions with confidence to your own auditors, stakeholders and regulators.
Why this matters for developers
If a Rating on your project can move depending on who's assessing it that week, you have no real way to know what you're being measured against, and no consistent basis to challenge a decision you think is wrong.
A published framework gives you something concrete to engage with: the exact rules being applied, and a documented route to flag where you think the evidence has been misread.
With our frameworks available openly, you can see how a project like yours is assessed before you ever engage with us: the tests applied, how the pillars are weighted, and what evidence moves a score. That means you can focus effort where it genuinely improves quality, and come to any conversation already knowing the rules.
We always engage with developers at the start of the Rating process, so we’re working from the most comprehensive, up-to-date information, and we give them the opportunity to correct any factual errors before publication.
It also protects you from a different kind of risk. When the same analysts who set your score are also the ones talking to you commercially, the incentives in that conversation aren't always clean, for you or for them.
Keeping meaningful separation between assessment and commercial contact isn't a formality. It's what keeps a Rating about your project rather than about the relationship.
Where we stand
We built Sylvera's frameworks this way well before any regulator asked us to, because we think it's simply the more defensible way to run a Rating agency.
Every Rating we issue carries the framework version it was assessed under. Every new or materially amended framework goes through our Framework Review Committee, an open consultation with external experts, with the Q&A published, so each one reflects market and scientific consensus, not just our in-house view.
Every rating is approved by a Ratings Committee with no commercial personnel on it, under a Ratings Oversight Committee sitting above. And our analysts don't join commercial client discussions, so no fee or commercial pressure reaches the people doing the assessment.
And our frameworks are available in our new Resource Hub, an easy-to-navigate home for our methodology deep-dives, product explainers and usage guides. We believe transparency is a vital part of how this market should function.
We keep a full internal record of which analysts worked on every Rating, for exactly the accountability and traceability that regulation is now asking the whole market to demonstrate. The principle behind that is simple: the Rating should be traceable to a documented process, not to an individual’s judgement on the day.
As the market matures under regulations such as the EU ESG Ratings Regulation, the question worth asking any Rating provider, ours included, is simple: if I gave you the same evidence twice, would I get the same answer twice? If the answer is “it depends,” that’s worth knowing before you rely on the Rating.
View the Resource Hub here to explore the Sylvera Ratings frameworks.
