“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.)
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When standing up a new biochar project in Namibia, converting Acacia Bush into durable carbon removals, Planboo faced a challenge common to emerging CDR developers: proving quality in a market still learning how to evaluate biochar credits, and where premium pricing depends on independently verified quality.
By working with Sylvera, Planboo secured an A Rating — covering carbon accounting, additionality, and permanence — that gives investors and offtakers a credible, data-backed foundation for procurement decisions. The result: stronger commercial positioning, accelerated commercial conversations, and a clear signal of quality in the growing biochar carbon removal market.
The challenge
Proving quality in an emerging CDR category
Biochar is one of the fastest-growing carbon removal categories, but still not broadly understood by mainstream buyers. Unlike more established nature-based project types, biochar credits require buyers to grapple with specific technical questions — permanence horizons, feedstock traceability, Life Cycle Assessments (LCA), and pyrolysis conditions — that go well beyond typical project risks.
For Planboo, this created two challenges:
- Building credibility around the project design, utilizing encroaching bush in Namibia
- Highlighting the high-durability and high-integrity characteristics of well-designed biochar projects within a crowded CDR space
"As a longstanding dMRV and project assurance partner within biochar CDR, we were confident in our ability to stand up high-quality projects. The challenge was to bridge the gap between the ‘nuts and bolts’ of our dMRV process and the market’s more general approach to quality assessment." – Freddie Catlow, CEO
Through collaboration with the implementation partner Carbon Capital, Planboo had built strong scientific and operational foundations — from its partnerships with FSC-certified feedstock suppliers to its high-temperature pyrolysis process and subsurface biochar soil application protocols. But translating that rigor into buyer-ready materials required independent validation that could speak the language of the market.
Planboo needed a way to:
- Differentiate itself in a growing biochar market
- Accelerate commercial conversations and move serious buyers into due diligence
- Defend a premium price point justified by verified quality
Why Sylvera
A trusted partner to bridge the credibility gap
When Planboo sought third-party validation, the decision to work with Sylvera was grounded in market recognition. Sylvera's Ratings are widely recognized by corporate buyers, asset managers, and compliance-focused counterparties as rigorous, independent assessments of carbon credit quality.
"Sylvera was an obvious frontrunner in the project ratings space, and we recognized their expertise within the biochar pathway. They took the time to deep-dive into the details of the Farm Gai Kaisa project in Namibia. As Sylvera’s ratings are widely accepted signals of integrity in the buyer space, we felt that this collaboration contributed to buyer confidence." – Max Doyon, Head of Sales, Planboo
Sylvera's Rating framework assessed Planboo across four pillars:
- Carbon Accounting — whether the project accurately reports the removals achieved
- Additionality — whether credits are a direct result of Planboo's activities
- Permanence — whether the carbon is stably sequestered over a 200-year timeframe
- Safeguarding & Co-benefits — potential impacts on the community and biodiversity
The assessment process also gave Planboo structured feedback on how to communicate key technical strengths — from its H/C ratio biochar stability data to its subsurface soil application — in formats that are immediately useful for commercial conversations.
The solution
An A Rating that reflects project quality
Sylvera assigned Planboo's Namibia biochar project a Rating of A, placing it in the top level of assessed projects and above the Biochar category average. The Rating was driven by strong scores across all integrity pillars.
- Strong carbon accounting
Planboo's carbon accounting exhibited a very low risk of over-crediting, earning Sylvera’s highest possible score. The project’s LCA approach and removals quantification were well aligned with Sylvera’s independent assessment, which recreates the project’s LCA using independent datasets to interrogate the project's emissions assumptions. The use of a feedstock deemed invasive, combined with FSC-certified suppliers, provided Sylvera with confidence in the appropriateness of the biomass for biochar production.
- High additionality
Sylvera assessed the project highly on additionality through Sylvera’s framework, which assesses the local policy environment, financial additionality, and the risk of double accounting claims. The project scored highly on policy and regulatory additionality, and Sylvera identified minimal risk of double credit accounting claims.
- Long-term permanence
Biochar can be a highly permanent form of carbon removal, and the project evidenced biochar permanence exceptionally well. Sylvera assesses permanence risks to biochar through assessment of the potential anthropogenic risks to biochar, the application method, and the intrinsic chemical properties of the produced biochar.
- Positive community and biodiversity impacts
Planboo demonstrated strong safeguarding and co-benefits across community engagement and biodiversity safeguards. The Farm Gai Kaisa project's positive impacts include improved water retention in local soils, sustainable feedstock sourcing verification through FSC-certified landowners, as well as the provision of biochar freely to local farmers to improve soil fertility and agricultural productivity.
See the full Rating and breakdown across the quality pillars here for this project here.
"Scoring highly on Carbon Accounting through our conservative emissions calculations is something we're proud of at Planboo. We've improved our tooling and documentation around LCA for future project analyses, and have begun producing replicable financial data across our projects." - Freddie Catlow, CEO, Planboo
Turning the Rating into commercial traction
Beyond the scores themselves, the Sylvera Rating gave Planboo a structured, commercial-ready summary of its project's integrity that could be referenced at different stages of investor and offtaker conversations.
“Most RFPs we fill out contain some form of external rating requirement. Not having one is almost a bigger red flag than having a suboptimal rating.” - Max Doyon, Head of Sales, Planboo
The results
From independent validation to market leadership
Sylvera's Rating gave Planboo a credible, independently verified foundation to accelerate buyer engagement, justify pricing, and establish itself as a quality credit supplier in the biochar category.
1. Pricing supported by verified quality
Planboo's future vintages from the Farm Gai Kaisa project are estimated to sell above the current Puro CORC Biochar Price Index. The Sylvera Rating provides the evidentiary basis for Planboo to justify this price point to buyers and potentially sell credits at a premium on this estimate.
2. Accelerated buyer engagement
Sylvera’s Rating provides immediate confidence for investors and offtakers looking to see proof of quality before committing.
“Since this Rating, we’ve been able to engage with buyers who have firm requirements on ratings BBB+.” - Max Doyon, Head of Sales
3. Internal alignment and sharper storytelling
The Rating process helped Planboo’s team sharpen its internal narrative — aligning commercial, technical, and fundraising communications around a consistent, independently verified set of project attributes.
4. A foundation for future sales
With vintages available through to 2029 and an estimated future supply of ~45,000 tonnes, Planboo is well-positioned to sell future issuances of Farm Gai Kaisa on the back of a strong ratings track record. The A Rating also serves as a yardstick for current and future biochar CDR Projects within the Planboo network.
About Planboo
Planboo is a global biochar carbon removal platform that enables scalable, high-integrity carbon removal by connecting a network of projects across geographies and agricultural sectors. Through its technology and project infrastructure guidance, Planboo empowers landowners in the tropics to convert sustainably sourced waste biomass into biochar—creating new income streams for farmers, improving soil health and productivity, and permanently removing carbon from the atmosphere.
Want to learn more about how Sylvera can help you navigate the biochar market? We’d love to hear from you. Get in touch here to discuss an assessment for your project.
See the full Rating for this project here in the free-access version of the Sylvera platform.
