“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.
Carbon markets have spent the last two years moving from concept to infrastructure. Article 6 of the Paris Agreement has progressed with signed agreements, issued authorizations, and real transactions behind them. The CORSIA Phase 1 deadline is approaching and countries as well as airlines are picking up momentum.
An increasing number of governments are now not only participating in carbon markets, but moving the markets forward.
This comes with complexity. Many of the rules are new. The data is often fragmented. And the stakes - for national climate targets, for development finance, for market credibility - are high.
This article helps give an overview of what's happening in carbon markets right now, what governments and multilaterals are actually trying to achieve, where they're getting stuck, and exactly what data and intelligence can help.
Where carbon markets stand today
Article 6 rules were finalized at COP29 in Baku in 2024, closing years of negotiation and giving countries the clarity to start building. Since then, progress has been steady but uneven.
Globally, 148 Article 6.2 agreements or memoranda of understanding have been signed, yet only a handful have converted into actual transfers of internationally transferred mitigation outcomes (ITMOs). Thailand's transactions with Switzerland remain the clearest example of a country moving from framework to delivery.
At the same time, the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is being wound down, with its final activities transitioning to the Paris Agreement Crediting Mechanism (PACM) by the end of 2026. That transition brings its own quality questions: many CDM projects eligible to move across use methodologies that were never accepted under newer integrity standards, which means host countries approving transitions are also, implicitly, making decisions about the credibility of their future supply.
Underneath all of this, demand for high-integrity, authorized credits is rising, driven by compliance schemes, corporate net-zero commitments, and aviation's CORSIA obligations. Supply of credits that actually clear the authorization bar is not rising nearly as fast.
Host countries are increasingly treating mitigation outcomes as a sovereign asset rather than a tradable commodity. Kazakhstan recently legislated an ITMO retention ratio of 30–50%, reserving that share for its own NDC. This is a trend likely to spread, and it changes the arithmetic: exportable supply is now a policy variable, not a function of project pipeline. Any forecast of authorized supply that ignores retention policy will overstate it.
The two forces every government and multilateral needs to understand
Article 6 gives countries two routes to participate in international carbon markets: bilateral cooperative approaches under Article 6.2, and the centralized PACM under Article 6.4.
Both require a host country to issue a Letter of Authorization (LoA) and apply a corresponding adjustment - the accounting step that prevents the same tonne of CO2 being claimed by both the buyer and the seller.
Getting this right requires an institutional capacity that most countries are still building: designated authorities, tracking systems, and a domestic legal basis for authorizing credits at all.
CORSIA, the aviation sector's compliance scheme, adds a second layer of demand on top of Article 6. To be CORSIA-eligible, a credit needs an approved methodology, an eligible vintage, and the same authorization and corresponding adjustment that Article 6 requires.
The two systems are effectively fused: a country that hasn't built Article 6 infrastructure can't supply CORSIA-eligible credits, no matter how strong its underlying projects are.
The numbers show how tight this bottleneck already is. Of the roughly 300 million credits potentially eligible for CORSIA's first compliance phase, only around 38 million — about 23% of expected demand — have actually cleared both hurdles. The constraint isn't project quality, it's authorization.
What this looks like right now
This plays out very differently by region, and looking at a few snapshots of real, interesting examples helps illustrate things better.
Latin America produces roughly a quarter of the world's carbon credits and has above-average project quality by Sylvera's ratings data. But of more than 60 active Letters of Authorization globally, only five come from the region - and nearly all of that comes from a single jurisdictional REDD+ programme in Guyana.
The region has the supply and the institutional history (a legacy of deep CDM-era engagement) but has been slower than its supply weight would suggest to build the authorization pipeline that converts credits into CORSIA-eligible, premium-priced units.
Africa, by contrast, has moved quickly despite starting from a much smaller base. Having captured barely 2% of global CDM activity, African countries now account for 34 of the 148 signed Article 6.2 agreements worldwide and 57 of 80 published Letters of Authorization. The five countries with the most LoAs are all African. Ghana, Zambia, Senegal, Morocco, and Kenya are the world's top Article 6.2 sellers.
That momentum has been reinforced by targeted capacity-building, including the Carbon Data Access Partnership (CaDAP), a joint initiative between Sylvera and UNDP Africa built specifically to close the data and readiness gap for African governments navigating Article 6.
Asia shows how differently the same mechanism plays out depending on which side of the table a government sits.
Singapore, a buyer with limited domestic decarbonization headroom, has moved faster on Article 6 than most: as of mid-2026 it has signed Implementation Agreements with 11 countries as the world's most active bilateral dealmaker under Article 6.2. Its domestic carbon tax already lets liable companies offset up to 5% of taxable emissions with eligible international credits, and in 2025 the Singapore government directly procured 2 million nature-based credits from projects in Ghana, Peru, and Paraguay, with a second procurement round planned.
Thailand sits on the other side of the table as a supplier. Its Bangkok e-bus programme, developed with Switzerland, completed the first-ever Article 6.2 ITMO transfer in December 2023, with a second issuance following in April 2026.
Japan is a buyer government running its own bilateral mechanism, the Joint Crediting Mechanism (JCM), which by early 2026 accounted for the majority of all Article 6.2 projects currently in implementation worldwide - even as its domestic policy focus shifts toward compliance under GX-ETS.
What governments and multilaterals are actually trying to do
Governments are typically trying to do one or both of two things:
1. Participate directly in carbon markets - buying credits to meet national climate targets, or authorizing the sale of credits from domestic projects
2. Build the domestic legal and institutional infrastructure that makes either possible. That means designing compliance systems, setting registration and issuance fees, and deciding which projects and methodologies meet the bar for authorization, often with limited local precedent to draw on.
Multilateral institutions - development banks, UN agencies, climate funds - share those same technical questions but usually sit one layer up.
Carbon markets, for a multilateral, are often a vehicle for broader development objectives: financing community-based agriculture, supporting poverty alleviation, or channeling results-based climate finance across a portfolio of countries rather than a single jurisdiction.
Where a government needs to get one country's Article 6 framework right, a multilateral often needs visibility across dozens of countries at once, each at a different stage of readiness.
Both face clear opportunity. Article 6 revenue can fund national climate plans. Multilateral programmes built on credible carbon data can direct capital toward projects and jurisdictions that will actually deliver.
Multilateral institutions often handle bilateral donor agreements. Where a buyer government wants the best price and a host country wants the highest, a multilateral institution/DFI/donor funding the underlying programme is usually watching for something else: whether the host country is getting a fair deal, and whether the poverty-reduction outcomes that justified the funding actually land.
But both are also navigating real pain points:
Policy complexity that outpaces internal capacity. Methodology updates, new regulatory guidance, and shifting registry requirements arrive faster than most public-sector teams can track through public sources alone.
No reliable way to compare host countries. Deciding which countries to prioritize for bilateral negotiation, capacity-building support, or portfolio allocation requires consistent, comparable risk and readiness data - which mostly doesn't exist in one place.
Pricing and fee-setting without market benchmarks. Governments setting registration or issuance fees, or negotiating LoA terms, often lack visibility into what buyers are actually paying for comparable credits elsewhere.
Designing domestic systems in a vacuum. Building a compliance scheme or eligibility list without reference to international quality standards risks either letting in low-integrity credits or excluding legitimate supply.
Portfolio-level oversight, for multilaterals specifically. Tracking Article 6 delivery risk, corresponding adjustment status, or project quality across a grant or investment portfolio spanning many countries is a fundamentally different (and harder) problem than assessing a single jurisdiction.
No agreed definition of "high integrity" among donors. A quieter constraint sits upstream of all of this. Several donor governments have not yet defined, at ministry level, what "high integrity" means for their own funds - whether emission reductions and removals are treated equivalently, what benefit-sharing standard applies, what disqualifies a methodology. Implementing agencies are ready to deploy public money to de-risk early-stage projects, run pre-feasibility work, and fund FPIC capacity. Many are waiting on a definition before they can commit.
How Sylvera helps
Governments and multilaterals engaging with carbon markets are, by definition, already committed to the goal. The friction is almost always about information: fragmented sources, inconsistent methodologies for comparing risk, data that's outdated by the time it reaches a policy team, and a shortage of independent analysis that can be defended internally or shared with an oversight body, an investment committee, or an international partner.
That's the gap independent, structured carbon market data is built to close - and it's where Sylvera's work with governments and multilateral institutions is concentrated.
Sylvera's data and intelligence products map onto the core decisions governments and multilaterals are making, whether the lens is a single jurisdiction or a multi-country portfolio.
This is the kind of partnership already underway with UNDP Africa through CaDAP, where Sylvera's Article 6 data is helping identify which African countries, projects, and programmes are ready to move, and where support is best targeted to close the gap.
And it’s the same principle behind Sylvera's work with the Singaporean government, helping identify high-quality ITMOs for its Article 6.2 purchases to channel climate finance to project host countries while advancing its own Paris Agreement targets.
Where to go from here
Compliance demand is converging with voluntary demand, authorization bottlenecks are already visible in the data, and the countries and institutions that build readiness now will be the ones capturing higher value, impact, and influence as the market matures.
You don't need to solve every piece of this at once. Whether you're a government trying to decide which countries to negotiate with, or a multilateral trying to see readiness across an entire portfolio, the starting point is the same: get a clear, independent view of where things actually stand today.
If that's useful to you, get in touch with Sylvera's policy team to talk through what this approach could look like for your organisation.
