.avif)
“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.
Annalise Downey, Head of Climate Consulting, and Aaron Tam, Product Director Market Data, hosted a live demo breaking down our recently launched Market Data product.
In this recap, we break down the areas and use cases of Market Data, showing how carbon market stakeholders can leverage real-time data on credit quality, pricing trends, and market movements to make smarter, strategic decisions.
What’s the state of the carbon market right now, according to Market Data?
The carbon credit market delivered positive news in the first half of 2024, with retirements surging to 95 million tons - the highest half-year figure on record. This growth was accompanied by a significant quality shift, as Double B+ rated retirements rose to 57% in H1, up from 52% in 2024, demonstrating the market's increasing focus on higher-quality credits.
Forestry and land use projects including ARR, IFM, and REDD continue to dominate the market, representing 31% of issued credits with average primary market prices of $24 for ARR projects, rising to $27 for triple B+ rated projects. A particularly notable trend emerged in industrial and commercial project categories, with HFC destruction and landfill methane projects rising dramatically to 19% of issuances, up from just 7.9% in the previous H1 period.
View a deeper dive into the numbers in our Q2 2025 Carbon Data Snapshot.
Use cases: Who uses Market Data and why?
Buyers: Procurement teams use Market Data to set accurate budgets and justify spending decisions, while optimizing their timing and contracting approach to determine whether spot contracts or offtake agreements provide better value. This data becomes particularly powerful when procurement teams need to bridge their decisions with strategic outcomes, especially when working with CFOs or finance departments to align on spending and justify their approach.
Investors: Investment teams use Market Data to identify emerging opportunities by spotting demand trends and supply constraints across different project types and geographies. The platform supports their fundraising and sales efforts by demonstrating market traction and potential ROI, helping them build compelling business cases for specific project types in particular geographies. Additionally, the data helps de-risk portfolio construction by providing insights into price volatility and supply reliability patterns.
Read our blog: What Are the Different Types of Carbon Market Data and How Can They Be Used?
Market Data platform overview
Market Data integrates multiple data streams that update daily. This includes an extensive pricing database that’s integrated with supply and retirement data from registries and Sylvera's unique quality ratings to provide a complete market picture.
The platform opens with an overview dashboard that presents top-level trends across prices, volumes, issuances, and quality distribution.
Weekly reports provide the latest market intelligence, tracking recent retirements, identifying top retirees, highlighting new issuances, and importantly, flagging new projects added to registries as indicators of upcoming supply.
The price analysis section reveals where market activity is concentrated and shows price distribution by project type, including quality premium analysis that demonstrates clear market preferences.
Regional insights further reveal specific country-level detail and comparison, for example that Africa ARR projects consistently command higher prices than comparable projects in Asia and the Americas.
Pricing insights: Quality and vintage premiums
The pricing section of Market Data allows users to dig deeper into carbon pricing comparisons and changes, such as clear market premiums for both project quality and co-benefits, with higher-rated projects consistently commanding better prices. An emerging trend shows strong vintage premiums, where 2024 vintages demand significant premiums over 2018 baseline prices, reflecting corporate buyers' increasing focus on fresh credits within a narrow 3-5 year vintage window.
While ARR projects average $27 per ton for quality-rated credits, the platform shows substantial price variability with quotes ranging up to $60 per ton, demonstrating the wide spectrum of pricing based on specific project characteristics and market positioning.
Retirement and supply trends
The retirements section of Market Data shows allows users to compare, for example, project types, quality distributions, or registry dynamics.
For example, recent data showed a large volume of household and community project retirements, while demonstrating a clear market evolution toward higher quality, with fewer lower-rated projects being retired as buyers become more selective. Verra maintained its position as the largest registry for retirements, though Gold Standard retirements were increasing.
On the supply side, the issuances section reveals the same grouping of data as retirements. In this case, it showed a notable slowdown in Verra issuances, primarily attributed to methodological updates that apply haircuts to project issuances, while American Carbon Registry issuances are increasing. It also showed strong movement toward technology-based issuances, reflecting both project developer focus and market demand patterns.
Project quality analysis and comparison
Companies are increasingly aware of quality challenges, with more organizations screening out high-risk projects through ratings or avoiding entire project categories with known issues.
The platform's quality analysis reveals comprehensive distribution patterns across all project types and regions, with detailed breakdow
What’s next for Market Data?
Aaron outlined four key development areas for the evolution of Sylvera’s Market Data.
The first focus involves extended coverage on Known Supply, addressing the opacity around credits actually available for purchase versus those simply issued but not yet retired. Enhanced, real-time visibility on around supply availability remains a priority.
[Update, this has recently been added to the platform under Known Supply]
Forward pricing insights represent the second focus area, recognizing that many buyers are interested in multi-year offtake agreements to secure high-quality supply in future years. The team is developing analysis and trajectory modeling for forward price development across different project types and timeframes.
The third area centers on corporate buyer demand analysis, providing valuable insights for developers and investors by analyzing retirement data and offtake patterns to understand who's buying credits, what specific attributes they're seeking, and their willingness to pay premiums for different project characteristics.
Finally, policy impact analysis will examine how regulatory decisions affect carbon credit markets, starting with a comprehensive CORSIA market report - now live, which you can read here. This analysis will extend beyond CORSIA to cover various policy decisions affecting both voluntary and compliance markets globally, helping stakeholders understand how regulatory changes could impact future pricing and demand patterns.
The Sylvera platform for Pre-Issuance
Sylvera’s platform gives access to various market intelligence tools, insights and data.
A key part of the Pre-Issuance solution is the Early Stage Catalog, which gives access to 200+ verified pre-issuance investment opportunities across 15+ project types, all in one place. It allows filtering across various needs, from project type to geographical region. And detailed project profiles provide transparency, including transaction terms, developer track records, and potential credit volumes.
Summary: What’s included in Sylvera’s Pre-Issuance Solution:
Daily market intelligence with real-time insights into pricing trends, quality patterns, and retirement activity
Interactive analytics that let you filter and drill down by project type, geography, registry, and quality ratings
Proprietary pricing data from 100,000+ price quotes across 40+ sources, helping you benchmark fair prices
Quality-price integration showing how Sylvera ratings translate into market premiums
Get started with your own Market Data demo
Want to get started with using Market Data in your strategic decision-making? We’d love to help. Request a demo to see our market-leading carbon data platform in action for your business.
