Carbon Removal vs Avoided Emissions: What’s the Difference?

While carbon removal and avoided emissions are often sold in the same unit, one tonne of CO2e, they certainly aren’t interchangeable. 

I was involved in the carbon-offset market very early on, when the phrase itself was still new. It was useful because it gave companies a simple way to understand that money could support climate action somewhere else. But I also came to see the problem with it. “Offset” sounds as though an emission on one side can be cancelled by an equal tonne on the other, as if the original emission has disappeared. 

That’s clearly far from true and it’s why the distinction between removal and avoidance matters.

If you protect a forest that would otherwise be cleared, you are trying to stop a future emission. If you restore degraded land and new trees grow, you are drawing carbon dioxide back out of the atmosphere. Direct air capture does the same physical job in a very different way, taking CO2 from the air and storing it underground. All three may eventually be expressed as tonnes of CO2e, but they do not represent the same climate outcome.

For a company buying carbon credits, this is more than terminology. It affects what evidence I would want to see, what risks I would worry about, what the project can credibly claim and, increasingly, whether the tonne is suitable for the company’s longer-term net-zero strategy.

C Level has worked with community-led nature projects since 2000, so we have had to make these distinctions in practice rather than only in methodology documents. Some of the projects we work with remove carbon by establishing new forest. Others avoid emissions by protecting carbon that is already stored. Some do both. While the category tells us what kind of climate outcome is being claimed; it still does not tell us whether the project is good.

That last point is worth emphasising because buyer demand has moved strongly towards removals. I understand why. At net zero, SBTi requires residual emissions to be neutralised with removals, and “taking carbon back out of the atmosphere” is easier to grasp than a counterfactual estimate of what would otherwise have happened. But I would still choose a well evidenced avoided-deforestation project over a weak removal simply because the second carries the more fashionable label.

So the useful comparison is not removal good, avoidance bad. It is: what physically happened to the carbon, how strong is the evidence, how durable is the outcome, and what does the buyer need that tonne to do?

These questions lie at the heart of what makes true high-integrity carbon projects.

Carbon removal vs avoided emissions: the simple difference

The physical distinction is straightforward.

	Avoided emissions / emissions reductions	Carbon removal
What happens	Greenhouse gases that would otherwise have been released are prevented or reduced	CO2 already in the atmosphere is taken out and stored
Typical examples	Avoided deforestation, methane destruction, some clean-cooking and fuel-switching projects	Reforestation, agroforestry, biochar, enhanced rock weathering, direct air capture
Main integrity question	Would those emissions really have happened without the intervention?	Was CO2 genuinely removed, and how securely will it remain stored?
Common project risk	Weak baseline, poor additionality, leakage	Reversal, uncertain durability, over-crediting, non-delivery
Role at corporate net zero	Can finance mitigation during the transition but does not neutralise residual emissions under SBTi	Required for neutralising residual emissions under SBTi
Typical market position	More abundant and generally cheaper	Scarcer and usually more expensive

The part I would pay most attention to is not the examples row but the main integrity question.

With avoidance, the carbon calculation depends on a counterfactual: what would have happened without the project? With removal, the buyer has a different problem: what was actually taken out of the atmosphere, where is it stored and how likely is it to stay there?

Those two questions lead you into different evidence.

There is a third question I would keep separate from both of them: what stage has the evidence reached? A forecast removal, a reported outcome and an independently verified unit may all refer to the same project, but they are not the same thing for a buyer.

That leaves three different axes which are too often collapsed into one:

Question	Possible answers	Why it matters
What happened to atmospheric carbon?	Removal / avoided or reduced emissions	Defines the physical climate outcome
How secure is the outcome?	Reversible biological storage → highly durable storage	Determines reversal risk and long-term suitability
How far has the evidence progressed?	Forecast / ex-ante → reported → independently verified / issued	Determines what the buyer can substantiate today

I find this much more useful than the usual shorthand of “removal is high quality, avoidance is low quality”. A removal can be poorly evidenced or still years from delivery. An avoidance credit can be independently verified against a conservative baseline. The category, the durability and the evidence state answer different questions.

What is carbon removal?

Carbon removal means taking CO2 from the atmosphere and transferring it into some form of storage.

The IPCC definition is useful because it includes both parts of the job: deliberate human activity must remove CO2 from the atmosphere and durably store it in vegetation, soils, geological formations, the ocean or products. That immediately rules out a common muddle. Capturing fossil CO2 at a chimney can reduce an emission, but it is not carbon dioxide removal because the CO2 was not taken from the atmosphere.

That might be biological storage in trees and soils. It might be carbon stabilised in biochar. It might be mineral or geological storage following direct air capture or enhanced rock weathering.

I would always separate removal from durability. They are related, but they are not the same claim.

A tonne stored in a living forest is exposed to fire, disease, land-use change and other reversal risks. A tonne mineralised into rock has a very different storage profile. That does not make the forest tonne worthless. Forest restoration can rebuild ecosystems, support livelihoods and remove atmospheric carbon at the same time. It does mean that a buyer should not compare the two as though only the price differs.

The Oxford Principles for Net Zero Aligned Carbon Offsetting make the same broad progression: move towards removals and, over time, towards removals with lower reversal risk as net zero approaches. View the publication.

That direction makes sense to me. What I would resist is turning it into a procurement shortcut. “Removal” tells you what the project says has happened to the carbon. It does not tell you whether the measurement is sound, whether the tonne has actually been delivered or whether the storage assumption is credible.

What are avoided emissions?

Avoided emissions are greenhouse gases that are not released because an intervention changes what would otherwise have happened.

Avoided deforestation is a good example because it exposes both the value and the difficulty of the category. If a forest is under a credible threat of clearance, keeping it standing can prevent a large release of carbon while protecting biodiversity and livelihoods at the same time.

But the carbon figure rests on the baseline.

When we look at an avoided-deforestation project, the project story is not enough. I want to know what was driving forest loss, what evidence supports the baseline rate, whether the threat is still current and whether activity is simply being displaced outside the project boundary.

If the forest was unlikely to be cleared anyway, the credited avoidance is weak. If the pressure moves next door, leakage has reduced the real benefit. If carbon finance was not needed to change the outcome, the additionality case is weak.

That is why I find avoidance harder to assess from a sales page. The atmosphere cannot show you the emission that did not happen. The buyer has to reconstruct the counterfactual from project evidence.

Avoided emissions vs avoidance carbon credits: two ideas that are often confused

There is another problem with the phrase avoided emissions: corporate carbon accounting uses it for something broader than avoidance credits.

Suppose a manufacturer sells a product that uses less energy than the conventional alternative. It may calculate the emissions customers avoid by using that product. The GHG Protocol treats that as a comparison against a counterfactual scenario, outside the company’s Scope 1, 2 and 3 inventory. View the GHG Protocol review.

SBTi takes the same position. Avoided emissions from the use of a company’s products do not count towards achievement of its science-based target.

An avoidance carbon credit is different. It is a unit generated by a mitigation project using a methodology, baseline, monitoring, verification and registry process.

You will also see emissions reduction used alongside avoidance. The terms overlap in carbon-market material, but they are not perfectly interchangeable in every methodology. I would therefore use the project methodology’s own description when assessing a unit rather than forcing everything into one vocabulary.

The distinction is easy to miss because both calculations ask a version of “what would have happened otherwise?” But they are not interchangeable assets and they do not sit in the same accounting system.

If I were reviewing a board paper that simply said the company had generated or purchased “50,000 tonnes of avoided emissions”, I would send that line back for clarification. Did the company calculate the wider effect of one of its products, or did it buy verified carbon credits from an external mitigation project? The number alone does not tell you.

The distinction also matters under SBTi’s new Ongoing Emissions Responsibility framework. Version 2.0 can recognise eligible verified mitigation outside the value chain, including emissions reductions and removals, but it specifically excludes product-level avoided emissions associated with the use of sold products.

That is a good example of where loose carbon language can turn into a reporting error.

Can one carbon project deliver removals and avoided emissions?

Yes. This is one of the reasons I would not infer the carbon outcome from a project photograph or even from a broad label such as “forest carbon”.

C Level’s own portfolio of Plan Vivo carbon credits gives us three useful examples:

Project	What happens on the ground	Carbon outcome
CommuniTree, Nicaragua	Farmers establish trees and agroforestry on degraded and underused land	Removal
Yaeda-Eyasi: Hadza and Datooga, Tanzania	Community land management protects threatened forest from clearance	Avoided emissions
Khasi Hills, India	Communities protect standing forest while degraded forest is allowed to recover	Both avoidance and removal

That last row is the one I find most helpful. Protecting existing Khasi forest avoids carbon being released, while regeneration increases carbon stocks and removes additional CO2 from the atmosphere. One landscape can therefore produce both outcomes because two different things are happening to carbon.

CommuniTree is especially useful to us because C Level has worked with the project since its early years. On our 2023 visit, we saw the chain behind a future removal: seed collection, nurseries, planting, young forest and established trees. By the time a buyer is looking at a verified tonne, a long sequence of work has already happened on the ground.

That experience makes me wary of treating carbon categories as abstractions. A removal credit is not created by changing a label in a registry. In a forestry project, it starts with somebody collecting seed, a farmer committing land, trees surviving the first years and the project continuing to monitor what grows.

The same caution works the other way. An avoided-emissions credit is not merely “keeping trees where they are”. The project needs a credible case that loss would otherwise have occurred and that the intervention has changed that trajectory.

This is why project type is not the same thing as carbon outcome, and carbon outcome is not the same thing as unit status.

If a supplier offers “forest credits”, I would still ask what the particular units represent. If the proposal bundles removals and avoided emissions into one undifferentiated total, I would separate them before anybody approves the purchase.

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Carbon removal vs avoided emissions: is removal always better?

No. But there is a good reason buyers increasingly prefer it.

Ecosystem Marketplace’s 2025 State of the Voluntary Carbon Market reported that removal credits sold at an average 381% premium over emissions-reduction credits in 2024, while removals represented only 5% of traded volume.

That is a striking premium, but I would not read it as a quality score.

It reflects scarcity, buyer demand, delivery cost, perceived integrity and the fact that removals have a role at net zero that avoided emissions do not. Some engineered removals are also simply expensive to produce.

The buyer preference is real. In our market, very few buyers now begin by asking for avoided-emissions credits. Most want removals or regeneration. I understand why: “we helped take carbon back out of the atmosphere” is easier to understand than a counterfactual baseline, and the direction of SBTi and the Oxford Principles reinforces that preference.

Where I part company with the simple version of that argument is at project level.

ICVCM’s Core Carbon Principles are useful here because the same fundamental integrity tests apply to both reductions and removals: additionality, robust quantification, independent validation and verification, permanence or reversal treatment, and no double counting. In other words, changing the carbon mechanism does not remove the need for integrity work.

Suppose I have two offers in front of me. One is a well evidenced avoided-deforestation unit with a conservative baseline, current verification and strong community governance. The other is a removal with weak monitoring, material reversal risk or delivery still several years in the future. I would not buy the second merely because the spreadsheet says “removal”.

The category tells me what kind of climate outcome I am trying to buy. The evidence tells me whether I believe it.

When avoided emissions can be the stronger climate intervention

Avoidance can be particularly valuable where there is an immediate, well evidenced source of emissions that can genuinely be stopped.

Methane is an obvious case. Preventing a methane release can have a rapid climate effect.

Protecting an intact forest can also be a very strong intervention where the threat is real. Once a mature ecosystem has been cleared, planting new trees does not instantly replace the carbon stock, biodiversity or ecological complexity that was lost.

So I would not dismiss avoided deforestation simply because it is not removal. I would make the project earn the counterfactual.

For an avoided-deforestation project, I want to understand:

What has historically been happening to the forest?

What is causing that loss?

Why would the project area be exposed to the same pressure?

What changes because carbon finance is present?

Where could leakage occur?

What has the latest monitoring actually found?

If those answers are weak, I would discount the headline tonne figure heavily. If they are strong, avoidance can represent very real climate value.

When carbon removal becomes necessary

At net zero, the decision changes.

If a company still has one tonne of residual CO2 entering the atmosphere, preventing an unrelated tonne elsewhere does not remove that residual tonne. SBTi therefore requires residual emissions at the net-zero target year to be neutralised using eligible carbon removals.

That is the point at which I would stop treating avoidance and removal as alternative ways of doing the same job. They are not.

A company that expects to have residual emissions in 2040 or 2050 should therefore start learning about removals before it needs them. Waiting until the target year and then discovering that durable removal supply is limited and expensive is not much of a procurement strategy.

Carbon removal durability: a tonne in a forest is not a tonne in rock

Once the company has decided it needs removal, the next question is what kind of storage?

Removal type	Where carbon is stored	What attracts buyers	What I would inspect closely
Reforestation / agroforestry	Living biomass and soils	Mature project model, nature and livelihood benefits	Reversal treatment, land tenure, monitoring and long-term management
Peatland / wetland restoration	Organic soils and ecosystems	Can stop losses while rebuilding carbon stocks	Whether the credited outcome is reduction, removal or mixed
Biochar	Stabilised carbon in solid material	More durable storage with an established commercial market	Feedstock, production method, lifecycle emissions and end use
Enhanced rock weathering	Mineral and dissolved inorganic carbon pathways	Potential for long-lived storage at large scale	Net removal after mining, grinding, transport and application emissions
DACCS	Geological storage after direct air capture	High measurability and potentially very long-lived storage	Whether the removal has actually been delivered, energy source and storage evidence

This is one place where I think buyers can be misled by apparently simple tonne comparisons.

A biological removal may cost much less than DACCS while delivering major biodiversity and livelihood benefits. DACCS may offer far greater storage durability but at a much higher cost and, in many contracts, a future delivery date.

Neither price tells you what the buyer should prefer until you know what job the tonne is meant to do.

SBTi Version 2.0 has started to make this distinction more explicit by separating short-lived and long-lived removals for eventual neutralisation. For long-lived residual greenhouse gases, it requires long-lived removals.

That is more demanding than simply telling companies to “buy removals”, and rightly so.

Carbon removal vs avoided emissions under SBTi in 2026

SBTi treats these outcomes differently depending on what the company is trying to do.

Carbon removal and avoided emissions do not replace Scope 1, 2 or 3 reductions

Neither an avoidance credit nor an external removal should be subtracted from the company’s Scope 1, 2 or 3 inventory to show progress against a science-based target.

This is one of the areas where I would be very wary of loose supplier language.

If a business emits 20,000 tCO2e and buys 20,000 removal credits, it has not suddenly become a zero-emissions business in its inventory. It still emitted 20,000 tonnes. It also financed 20,000 tonnes of removal elsewhere.

Keeping those numbers separate gives the board a much clearer picture of what has actually happened.

Carbon removal and emissions reductions can both support SBTi OER

Ongoing Emissions Responsibility is broader than net-zero neutralisation.

Under Version 2.0, eligible verified mitigation can include emissions reductions outside the value chain, protection or enhancement of natural sinks, and carbon removals.

That means a good avoidance credit is not disqualified from OER simply because it is not a removal.

But SBTi draws the line at product-level avoided emissions associated with the use of sold products. Those are not eligible for OER recognition.

If the words “avoided emissions” appear in an OER proposal, I would check exactly which of those two things is being described before going any further.

Carbon removals are required for residual emissions at net zero

At the net-zero target year, SBTi requires residual emissions to be neutralised with removals.

Version 2.0 also signals a shift towards more removal support from 2035 onwards, but those future provisions are currently illustrative and are due to be reviewed before they take effect.

I would use that as a planning signal rather than pretending the post-2035 percentages are already fixed procurement rules.

For companies working through this in detail, our SBTi carbon credits guide and Beyond Value Chain Mitigation guide deal with the wider framework.

Carbon removal credits: a purchase can precede the removal by years

This is the part of the removal market I would make very explicit in any board paper.

Buying a carbon removal does not always mean the CO2 has already been removed.

The UK’s 2025 State of Carbon Dioxide Removal report found that UK novel CDR companies had sold more than 130,000 tonnes of future credits while only around 8,000 tonnes had been delivered at the time of the analysis.

That is not evidence that forward purchases are inherently poor. Quite the opposite: newer removal technologies often need buyers to commit capital before capacity can be built.

But a forward contract and an ex-post verified removal are not the same asset.

When we assess a carbon offer, this is the sort of distinction I want visible on the first page rather than buried in the methodology:

Delivered: Has the CO2 already been removed?

Verified: Has the result been independently assured?

Issued: Does an actual unit exist in the registry?

Forward: Is the buyer contracting today for delivery in a future year?

Suppose a supplier offers 1,000 removal tonnes for 2029 delivery and another offers 1,000 verified tonnes available now. I would not put those in the same price column without making the delivery difference explicit. The future contract may be the better climate-finance decision, but the buyer is taking delivery risk and must claim it differently.

The same principle applies in nature. Early money can be extremely valuable. It just should not acquire an ex-post claim before the carbon has caught up with the finance.

Carbon removal delivery questions to ask before buying

For a future removal, I would ask four questions before spending much time on the headline price:

When will the removal happen? A delivery year should be clear.

What happens if it does not? Look for replacement, repayment, make-good or another remedy.

When does the unit come into existence? A contract, forecast, reported outcome and issued credit are different things.

What evidence will prove the storage? The methodology, monitoring, independent assurance and storage pool should all be identifiable.

A sales deck may describe all of these as “carbon removals”. Procurement should not.

Carbon removal vs avoidance credit prices: price comes after the outcome

Removal credits usually cost more. That is real market information, but it is not where I would start the comparison.

Ecosystem Marketplace found the average removal premium at 381% over emissions-reduction credits in 2024. The UK State of Carbon Dioxide Removal has also reported very different indicative cost levels across novel CDR pathways, with biochar well below DACCS in the datasets it reviewed.

Those gaps are not surprising. An avoided-deforestation project, a reforestation project, a biochar facility and a direct-air-capture plant are not four brands of the same product.

They differ in:

• what physically happens to the carbon;
• when the outcome is delivered;
• how it is measured;
• how long storage is expected to last;
• what can reverse it;
• what infrastructure has to be built;
• what other nature and community outcomes are created.

If two offers differ by £30 a tonne, I would first establish whether they are genuinely comparable. Only then does the £30 become useful information.

This is where cheap-credit discussions often go wrong. A £5 avoidance unit that is already issued, well monitored and suitable for the buyer’s purpose can be a better purchase than a £40 removal with weak evidence. But if the £5 price reflects an old vintage, an inflated baseline or an outcome the buyer does not actually want, it is not a bargain. It is a different product.

Price belongs after the carbon outcome and the evidence, not before them.

Our carbon credit price guide looks at that market in more detail.

How to assess carbon removal and avoidance credits

By this point the two diligence paths should look different.

Due diligence for avoidance carbon credits

For avoidance, I would start with the counterfactual rather than the certificate.

Baseline: What is assumed to happen without the project, and how conservative is that assumption?

Additionality: What changes because carbon finance exists?

Leakage: Could the emitting activity simply move elsewhere?

Monitoring: What does the latest monitoring period show?

Reversal: If an existing carbon stock is being protected, how is later loss handled?

Regulatory surplus: Is the credited activity already required by law or fully supported by another policy?

I give more weight to the current monitoring and verification documents than to a project’s headline claim because the first set tells me what has actually been examined. A project can have a compelling social story and still need a weak baseline challenged.

Due diligence for carbon removal credits

For removal, I start somewhere else.

Quantification: How was gross removal calculated, and which project emissions were deducted?

Storage: Where is the carbon now?

Durability: How long is it expected to remain there?

Reversal: What could put it back into the atmosphere?

Delivery status: Is the tonne forecast, contracted, reported, verified or issued?

Lifecycle emissions: Particularly for engineered removals, have energy, transport, feedstock and processing emissions been accounted for?

A supplier describing a project as “verified removal” does not end that inquiry. I want to know what was verified, for which monitoring period, and whether the particular unit being sold is inside that verified set.

That last step sounds fussy until you see a project page quoting its total lifetime potential beside a buyer offer for a current vintage. The numbers may both be accurate and still describe different things.

Carbon removal and avoidance credits share a final evidence chain

Once the carbon mechanism is understood, both routes eventually reach the same practical documents:

Methodology → Monitoring → Verification → Registry → Unit status → Retirement.

That chain is more useful to me than a generic “high-integrity” badge.

I also want to know who controls the land or project rights, how local participants are involved, what happens to project revenue and whether the governance can plausibly last for as long as the carbon claim requires.

Those questions have become more important, not less, as buyers have moved towards removals. A technically impressive tonne with weak land or community foundations is not a project I would be comfortable recommending.

There is also a simple evidence hierarchy I use when the materials disagree. I give more weight to the current methodology, monitoring report, verification statement and registry record than to a supplier summary or project sales page. If the sales page says “verified removals” but the registry shows future or reported units, the registry wins. If a lifetime project figure is much larger than the current issued volume, I keep those numbers separate.

That sounds obvious, but it is exactly where a polished carbon proposal can become misleading without containing a single false number.

Carbon removal vs avoided emissions claims: make the carbon outcome visible

The cleanest claims say exactly what happened.

For an avoided-emissions credit:

We funded a verified project that prevented X tCO2e of emissions outside our value chain.

For an ex-post removal:

We funded X tCO2e of independently verified carbon removal from [project].

For a forward removal:

We have contracted to fund X tCO2e of future carbon removal for delivery between [dates].

I would be uncomfortable with a supplier turning all three into “we removed X tonnes” at the point of purchase. In the forward case, the removal has not happened yet. In the avoidance case, removal is not the carbon mechanism at all.

The same discipline applies to the company’s footprint. Buying either outcome does not normally justify rewriting Scope 1, 2 or 3 as though the original emissions never occurred.

I think the more defensible corporate story is also the more interesting one:

This is what we emitted. This is what we are doing to reduce it. This is the additional climate action we chose to finance, and this is the evidence behind it.

There is much more substance in that than in trying to force every project into one claim of “offsetting”.

How companies should choose between carbon removal and avoided emissions

If a company asks me whether it should buy removals or avoided-emissions credits, I would first ask what job the money is meant to do.

This is not theoretical for us. C Level’s current project material includes pure removal, pure avoided-emissions and mixed projects, so we have to make this distinction when a client asks what its money will actually fund. CommuniTree is removal. Yaeda-Eyasi is avoided emissions. Khasi Hills contains both. I would much rather show those differences explicitly than sell three projects as interchangeable “nature tonnes”.

What the company wants to do	What I would consider
Finance high-integrity climate action now	Strong reductions/avoidance and removals can both have a role
Build towards eventual net-zero neutralisation	Start increasing exposure to removals, including more durable storage
Protect a threatened high-carbon ecosystem	A credible avoided-deforestation project may be the direct intervention
Restore degraded land and grow new carbon stocks	Reforestation, agroforestry and other biological removals
Support emerging durable CDR	Biochar, enhanced weathering, DACCS and other long-lived removal pathways
Make an immediate ex-post tonne claim	Buy outcomes that have already happened and been independently verified
Catalyse future supply	Forward or ex-ante finance can be appropriate, but the claim must remain future-facing

For most businesses buying voluntarily today, my preference is to lead with regeneration and removals. That reflects where buyer demand has moved, where the net-zero standards are heading and the kind of projects C Level has spent years working with.

But I would keep two exceptions firmly in mind.

First, I would not ignore a strong avoided-emissions project where the threat is immediate, the baseline is persuasive and the wider nature or community value is substantial.

Second, I would not pay a removal premium for a unit whose delivery, monitoring or storage case I do not trust.

That is the judgement I would want a buyer to take away from this article. The words avoidance and removal tell you which carbon problem the project is trying to solve. They do not relieve you of the job of reading the evidence.

After more than twenty-five years working around carbon projects, that remains the part I would spend the most time on.

Carbon removal vs avoided emissions FAQ

Carbon removal and avoided emissions support from C Level

C Level has worked with community-led nature projects since 2000. Our commercial emphasis today is on regeneration and removals, but we do not treat that preference as a substitute for project assessment.

When we look at a carbon offer, we want to know what outcome the unit represents, whether it has actually been delivered, what evidence has been verified, how the carbon is stored, what can reverse it and what the buyer intends to say afterwards.

That is also how I would start a conversation with a company choosing between avoidance and removal. Not with a catalogue of projects and not with the cheapest tonne, but with the purpose of the money and the evidence the company will need to retain.

Once those are clear, the project shortlist becomes much easier.

• Explore C Level carbon projects
• Read how we assess high-integrity carbon credits
• Read our SBTi carbon credits guide
• Read our BVCM guide

Sources and methodology

This article distinguishes physical carbon outcomes, corporate inventory accounting and carbon-credit project accounting because the same words are often used differently across those systems. Time-sensitive sources were checked on 16 September 2026.

• IPCC AR6 WGIII, Carbon Dioxide Removal factsheet. Source for the definition of CDR as deliberate removal of atmospheric CO2 followed by durable storage. View the factsheet.
• ICVCM, Core Carbon Principles. Source for integrity principles applying across emissions reductions and removals, including additionality, permanence, robust quantification, independent validation and verification, and no double counting. View the principles.
• C Level, Plan Vivo Carbon Credits: How the Standard Works. Source for the C Level portfolio classifications used in the CommuniTree, Yaeda-Eyasi and Khasi Hills comparison. Read our Plan Vivo carbon credits guide.
• GHG Protocol, Inventory and Project Accounting: A Comparative Review. Source for the separation between corporate inventory accounting and counterfactual project accounting, including avoided emissions. View the review.
• GHG Protocol, Corporate Value Chain Scope 3 Standard. Source for avoided emissions being reported separately from Scope 1, 2 and 3 inventories. View the standard.
• Science Based Targets initiative, FAQs. Source for avoided emissions not counting towards science-based target achievement. View the FAQs.
• SBTi Corporate Net-Zero Standard Version 2.0 criteria. Source for OER eligibility, the exclusion of product-level avoided emissions, post-2035 illustrative removal provisions and neutralisation of residual emissions with removals. View the criteria.
• Oxford Principles for Net Zero Aligned Carbon Offsetting, revised 2024. Source for shifting towards removals and increasingly durable storage as net zero approaches. View the publication.
• Ecosystem Marketplace, State of the Voluntary Carbon Market 2025. Source for the 381% removal price premium and removal credits representing 5% of 2024 transaction volume. View the report.
• The UK State of Carbon Dioxide Removal 2025. Source for UK novel CDR sales versus delivered removals and illustrative market prices by removal method. View the report.
• Plan Vivo, CommuniTree Nicaragua. Source for CommuniTree’s reforestation and agroforestry classification. View the project record.
• Plan Vivo, Yaeda-Eyasi Landscape Tanzania. Source for the avoided-deforestation comparison. View the project record.
• C Level, CommuniTree Project Visit 2023. Source for C Level’s first-hand project visit and the project stages described in the article. Read the visit report.