“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 problem with waiting until after registration
Traditionally, developers have approached quality validation the way they approach ratings: as something that happens to a project after it's registered, not something that’s possible to shape in advance.
Historically, there wasn't much alternative. Developers designed a project, submitted it to the registry, waited for validation and verification, and then found out how the market and independent assessors viewed their work.
But by that point, the design decisions that determined a rating had already been made. If, for example, additionality arguments were weak, your monitoring approach insufficient, or your permanence safeguards unconvincing, retrofitting solutions would be expensive, often impossible.
The cost of discovering quality issues after registration can be make or break. It affects the price you can command for your credits and the investors you can attract.
What delivery risk actually looks like for investors
Before exploring how to communicate quality, it's worth understanding what sophisticated investors are actually worried about, as ratings are just the tip of the iceberg.
Delivery risk is the gap between what a project promises to issue and what it actually delivers. For example, roughly half of all ARR projects under-deliver relative to their initial projections. And among those that do, the average shortfall is around 54% of projected credits.
The causes are varied: unconservative ex-ante assumptions, implementation delays, staggered planting schedules, natural disasters, methodology risk. But the underlying problem is usually that investors and developers made decisions based on projections that didn't adequately account for the complexity of what they were trying to do.
For an investor evaluating an early-stage project, this is the backdrop to every conversation. They've seen projects miss projections. What they're looking for - and what many developers fail to give them - is credible, independently validated evidence that this project is different.
The case for getting assessed at an early stage
A Pre-Issuance Rating from Sylvera gives developers an independent, third-party assessment of a project's likely quality. Before registration, before credits exist, and while there's still time to act on the findings.
The assessment evaluates the same dimensions that a full Sylvera Rating examines at issuance: additionality, permanence, carbon, co-benefits, and overall project quality. It includes a Delivery Risk module, and a Continuous Improvement Report that doesn't just tell you where you stand, but what to fix and how, while your project design is still fixable.
This is important. An improvement that would be impossible to implement post-registration might take weeks to address during design. A weak additionality argument that would cost you a rating level at issuance (and meaningful price premium in the market) can be strengthened before it reaches the market.
For developers, the ROI is straightforward. Higher ratings command meaningfully higher prices. AAA-rated projects consistently command significant premiums over BBB projects in equivalent methodology and geography categories. But getting there requires knowing the gaps early enough to close them.
Using your rating as a fundraising asset
A Pre-Issuance assessment isn't just useful internally. It's a fundraising document.
Investors evaluating early-stage carbon projects face the same information problem developers do, just from the other side. They're trying to assess project quality, delivery probability, and price potential without the benefit of a registry rating, a track record, or - in many cases - meaningful data at all. Most are relying on developer projections and third-party consultants with their own incentives and methodologies.
A Sylvera Pre-Issuance assessment gives investors an independent, methodology-grounded view of expected quality and delivery risk from an organisation with no commercial interest in the volume of credits the project generates. Investors know Sylvera is not incentivised to inflate its assessments.
Developers who have gone through pre-issuance assessment can also display the Sylvera Ratings Badge, a visible, standardised signal of independent quality review that buyers and investors recognise and reference when making decisions. In a market where credibility is hard to demonstrate, this is one of the clearest signals a developer can send.
Turning quality into commercial advantage
The developers who navigate fundraising most effectively aren't only the ones with the best projects. They're the ones who can most clearly demonstrate that their project is good, in terms that investors understand and trust.
That means going into fundraising conversations with more than a PDD and a projection model. It means being able to show an independent assessment of your likely rating tier. It means having data on what projects at that rating tier actually sell for in the market, drawn from real transactions, not broker estimates. And it means knowing which investors actively back projects like yours, and being able to approach them with a targeted pitch rather than a generic one.
Each of those capabilities exists. The developers who use them close rounds faster, negotiate from a stronger position, and build projects that actually perform at the level they promised, because they identified and addressed quality gaps before they became permanent fixtures of the project design.
What to do next
If you're developing a carbon project and approaching a fundraising round and need to understand where your project stands, Sylvera's Pre-Issuance assessment gives you that picture. And you’ll get the market data to contextualise what it means for pricing and the commercial tools to turn quality into capital.
Get in touch to discuss a Pre-Issuance assessment for your project.
