A high-integrity carbon credit stands for a real climate outcome that would not have happened without the carbon finance. It is calculated with a credible methodology and conservative assumptions. It deals honestly with the risk of the carbon being lost, or of the emissions simply moving somewhere else. It has been independently validated and verified, and it can be traced on a registry through to its retirement.
For a nature project, I would also want to know who controls the land, whether the community helped shape the project, how the money is shared and what is happening to the wider ecosystem.
A recognised carbon standard is where that assessment starts, not where it ends. I would never buy on the strength of a standard logo alone.
I want to know what produced the tonne.
| What to check | What I would want to see |
|---|---|
| Carbon outcome | Is it a removal, a reduction or an avoided emission? |
| Additionality | Would the climate benefit happen without carbon finance? |
| Quantification | How was the carbon benefit calculated, and how conservative are the assumptions? |
| Permanence | How long is the carbon stored, and what happens if some of it is lost? |
| Leakage | Could the activity simply move emissions somewhere else? |
| Verification | What has actually been checked independently? |
| Registry and retirement | Can the issued credit be traced and taken permanently out of circulation after use? |
| People and nature | Who controls the project, who receives the money and what happens to the wider ecosystem? |
Those checks tell me far more about a carbon credit than its price.
Buying these for an organisation?
C Level has chosen and supplied Plan Vivo credits for 25 years. We can show you where every tonne came from, and who was paid for it.
Carbon credits for businessWant to buy a few yourself?
You can fund forest restoration with the Khasi people of Meghalaya, from £10. The panel is further down this page.
Once those basics are clear, and you are buying carbon credits for a business, the next question is a simple one: what do you actually want your money to do?
For most of the companies we work with now, the answer is carbon removal through regeneration. They want to help create or restore forests, mangroves and other living systems that draw carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, while rebuilding biodiversity and creating an income for the people looking after the land.
I understand that instinct. It is where I would start too.
One thing worth separating early. Buying credits is not the same as reducing your own emissions, and it does not satisfy a procurement requirement. A PPN 006 Carbon Reduction Plan is about the emissions your organisation produces and how you intend to cut them.
But “carbon credit” covers a remarkably wide range of projects. Some remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Others reduce emissions or prevent emissions that were expected to happen. They use different methodologies, store carbon for different lengths of time and can have completely different effects on the landscape and the people living there.
Start by deciding what sort of carbon outcome you want
A carbon credit is normally expressed as one tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent, or tCO₂e. But two credits representing one tCO₂e can come from very different climate interventions.
A carbon removal takes carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and stores it.
Reforestation is a straightforward example. Trees grow, carbon accumulates in the biomass and landscape, and the increase is quantified according to the project methodology.
An emissions reduction means a project causes fewer greenhouse-gas emissions than would otherwise have occurred.
An avoided emission is a form of reduction in which an expected emission is prevented. Avoided deforestation is a familiar example.
I would keep those categories clear. Removing a tonne of carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere is not the same intervention as preventing a predicted tonne from being emitted.
Most serious corporate buyers we speak to now favour removals, and I think that is understandable. The Oxford Principles for Net Zero Aligned Carbon Offsetting recommend reducing your own emissions first and progressively increasing the proportion of removals used to address residual emissions as you move towards net zero. View the Oxford Principles.
Nature-based removals can do rather more than store carbon.
Walk around a good reforestation project and the “co-benefits” stop being an ESG phrase. There are trees where there were none, recovering soils, more habitat, farmers growing something with long-term value and money flowing into communities that are doing the work.
That is the part of carbon finance I have always found most compelling.
It is why C Level has spent so much of the past 26 years working with regenerative projects rather than treating carbon as an anonymous tonne on a screen.
A recognised carbon standard is the starting point
A credible carbon standard matters. It sets the rules for project design, methodologies, monitoring, safeguards, validation, verification and issuance.
I would not buy a voluntary carbon credit without understanding the standard behind it.
But I would not stop there either.
The Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market, or ICVCM, makes much the same distinction through its Core Carbon Principles. View the Core Carbon Principles.
Its assessment happens at two levels.
First, ICVCM assesses the carbon-crediting programme. A programme meeting its requirements for governance, tracking, transparency, verification and safeguards can become CCP-Eligible.
It then assesses the methodologies or categories of credits generated within eligible programmes. Credits can carry the CCP label only where the relevant requirements are satisfied.
I think that distinction is important because I have never been comfortable treating every credit issued under the same standard as interchangeable.
The methodology matters.
The project matters too.
Take additionality. Two projects can operate under the same standard and methodology while presenting quite different evidence that carbon finance caused something to happen that otherwise would not.
Certification gives you a disciplined process and independent oversight. I still want to understand the project sitting underneath it.
ICVCM itself has demonstrated why this matters. It declined to approve credits from some existing renewable-energy methodologies because their additionality requirements were not strong enough to meet the Core Carbon Principles threshold. Read the ICVCM decision.
Plan Vivo’s PV Climate programme became CCP-Eligible on 4 August 2026, subject to specified conditions including applicable Project Requirements and the use of accredited validation and verification bodies. Read the ICVCM announcement.
I am pleased to see Plan Vivo receive that recognition. C Level has been involved with Plan Vivo projects for decades.
But programme eligibility does not make every Plan Vivo Certificate a CCP-labelled credit. The relevant methodology, category and unit still have to qualify.
I would rather describe that accurately than turn a useful piece of recognition into a claim it does not support.
Seven questions I would ask before buying a carbon credit
Carbon standards can become technical very quickly. The questions I use are much simpler.
1. Would the project have happened without carbon finance?
This is the problem additionality is trying to answer.
Suppose a landowner was already legally required, and fully funded, to restore a forest. Selling carbon credits for doing exactly the same work would leave an obvious question: what did the carbon money actually cause?
For a community reforestation project, carbon finance might make tree growing economically viable on land that would otherwise remain degraded or be used for something else.
The project documents should explain the baseline, the barriers to change and the role carbon revenue plays.
My first question is usually:
If the carbon money disappeared, what would happen?
I would then check the evidence behind the answer. When was carbon finance first considered? What does it pay for? Is the activity already required by law? Does the project still make financial sense without it?
Additionality is a formal methodological test. Those fairly ordinary questions help you see whether the economic story underneath it makes sense.
2. How was the tonne calculated?
A forest does not come with a carbon meter attached to it.
Somebody has to define the project boundary, establish a baseline, measure or model carbon stocks, determine the sampling method, account for uncertainty and decide how frequently monitoring takes place.
Those decisions sit inside the methodology.
I would look for conservative assumptions rather than impressive-looking precision.
Carbon accounting is perfectly capable of producing a very precise wrong answer. Six decimal places do not rescue a bad baseline.
What matters is whether the methodology captures the carbon change the project can reasonably claim to have caused, and whether uncertainty has been dealt with sensibly.
3. What keeps the carbon out of the atmosphere?
For nature-based removals, carbon storage is biological.
Trees can burn. They can die. Forests can be harvested or cleared.
I don’t see that as an argument against forests. I see it as a reason to ask how the project manages the risk.
Depending on the standard and project, that can include long-term agreements, continued monitoring, buffer mechanisms, replacement provisions and rules governing what happens after a reversal.
I am much more comfortable with a forest project that explains its biological risks properly than one pretending a tree is a geological vault.
4. Could the emissions simply move somewhere else?
Carbon methodologies call this leakage.
Suppose a project prevents forest clearance inside its boundary, but the activity responsible for that clearance simply moves down the road and destroys another area of forest.
You cannot sensibly ignore the second forest.
Credible land-use methodologies therefore identify material leakage risks and account for them where required.
This matters because real landscapes are messy. Farming, grazing, forestry, fuelwood and people’s livelihoods do not stop neatly at the line somebody has drawn around a carbon project.
5. What has actually been independently checked?
The terms validation and verification are often used together, but they are not the same thing.
Validation checks whether a project’s design complies with the relevant standard and methodology.
Verification checks reported project performance and carbon outcomes against those requirements.
Under Plan Vivo’s PV Climate process, projects submit annual reports and undergo third-party verification at least every five years, with requirements varying according to the applicable project rules and scale. Plan Vivo publishes validation and verification information for its projects. See the PV Climate certification process.
If I were buying, I would ask what has been validated, what has been verified and which monitoring period the verification covers.
Those are much better questions than simply asking whether the project is “verified”.
6. Can I trace the credit and its retirement?
Once a credit has been issued, I want a proper registry trail.
There are several different double-counting risks.
Double issuance means more than one credit is issued for the same underlying climate outcome.
Double use means the same issued credit is used more than once.
Double claiming concerns more than one party claiming the same underlying mitigation towards their respective climate goals or targets.
A registry deals with the unit itself by recording issuance, transfers and retirement. Once you use an issued credit, it should be retired so it cannot simply be sold again.
For some international claims, Paris Agreement accounting and corresponding adjustments can also become relevant. Whether that applies depends on the use being made of the credit, so I would expect the supplier to know the answer for the units being proposed.
The PV Climate registry for Plan Vivo Certificates is managed by S&P Global. See Plan Vivo registry information.
For a corporate purchase, I would expect the documentation to identify the project, relevant unit or vintage information where applicable, the volume purchased and the retirement arrangements.
After retirement, I want the record.
Without that chain, you have a claim about a tonne. With it, you have a traceable unit.
Disclosure is a separate discipline from choosing a credit. A company large enough to fall inside the UK’s statutory energy and carbon reporting rules publishes figures that follow those rules, whatever claim it makes about the credits it has bought.
7. Who is actually benefiting from the finance?
I have never thought carbon accounting should stop at the tonne.
For a nature project, I also want to know who controls the land, who helped design the project, who is doing the work, what happens to the ecosystem and how the money reaches the people responsible for maintaining it.
This is one reason we have stayed close to Plan Vivo.
Plan Vivo states that at least 60% of the revenue generated from the sale of Plan Vivo Certificates must go back to local communities. See Plan Vivo’s requirement. Its standards also address local participation, land rights and environmental and social safeguards.
The 60% requirement does not make the carbon automatically good. The carbon still has to be properly quantified and the project still has to meet the standard.
But I think the flow of money matters.
If farmers and communities are expected to maintain a restored landscape for decades, the economics need to work for them as well as for the carbon buyer.
What does the Core Carbon Principles label actually tell you?
ICVCM created ten Core Carbon Principles as a global benchmark for high-integrity carbon credits.
They cover:
- effective governance;
- tracking;
- transparency;
- robust independent third-party validation and verification;
- additionality;
- permanence;
- robust quantification;
- no double counting;
- sustainable-development benefits and safeguards;
- contribution towards net-zero transition.
For buyers, the useful part is the additional independent assessment of both programmes and the methodologies or categories operating within them.
The terminology is worth getting right.
A CCP-Eligible programme has passed ICVCM’s programme assessment.
A CCP-Approved category or methodology has passed the relevant assessment at that level.
A CCP-labelled credit must satisfy the applicable requirements through the eligible programme and approved category.
If somebody tells me a credit is “CCP approved”, I would ask what, precisely, has been approved.
The answer should identify the programme, the methodology or category and the status of the units being offered.
Carbon removals are not all the same
Choosing removals narrows the field. It does not finish the job.
A nature-based removal stores carbon in biological systems such as forests and soils.
A durable removal generally uses storage intended to hold carbon for much longer periods, potentially hundreds or thousands of years, through geological, mineral or other engineered routes.
Those are materially different things.
| Removal type | What I would examine particularly closely |
|---|---|
| Reforestation and agroforestry | Permanence, land tenure, measurement and community participation |
| Soil carbon | Measurement uncertainty, additionality and durability |
| Biochar | Feedstock, lifecycle accounting and storage durability |
| Engineered removal | Energy source, lifecycle emissions and long-term storage |
Calling something a removal does not tell you whether it is a good one.
For the corporate buyers we work with, community-led reforestation remains very compelling. One funding decision can draw carbon from the atmosphere while restoring degraded land, creating habitat and supporting livelihoods.
There is a reason people want to fund that.
If you are planning specifically for the neutralisation of residual emissions at net zero, however, increasingly durable storage is likely to become a larger part of the mix. The revised Oxford Principles explicitly recommend moving towards removals with durable storage as organisations approach net zero.
I don’t think that makes forests an inferior version of engineered removal.
A regenerated forest and a tonne of mineralised carbon are doing different jobs. Buy them with that difference in mind.
Does a more expensive carbon credit mean a better one?
No.
Carbon-credit prices reflect all sorts of things: project costs, location, supply and demand, removal type, vintage, monitoring requirements, community payments, scarcity and the commercial route through which the credit reaches you.
None of those, by itself, is a carbon-integrity score.
For regenerative projects, I am interested in what the price is actually funding.
Someone has to grow the seedlings. Someone has to plant them, monitor the trees, work with farmers and landholders, collect the data, maintain the project systems and pay for validation and verification. If the land is to remain restored, somebody has to have a reason to keep it that way.
That financial plumbing is part of the project, not an awkward detail behind it.
Plan Vivo’s minimum community revenue-share requirement makes one element unusually easy to see.
A cheaper credit can be entirely credible. A more expensive credit can still be the wrong carbon outcome for what you are trying to achieve.
I would choose the project first and discuss price second.
If you need the figures themselves, I have set out what a business should expect to pay per tonne in 2026, and why the same tonnage is quoted at very different numbers.
What should your carbon-credit supplier be able to show you?
You do not need to become a carbon-methodology auditor before buying credits.
But I do think you should be able to follow the line from the project on the ground to the units being offered to you.
| Ask for | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Project name and location | What activity and landscape you are financing |
| Carbon-crediting programme | Which rules govern the project |
| Methodology | How the carbon outcome is calculated |
| Carbon outcome | Whether you are buying a removal, reduction or avoided emission |
| Vintage or monitoring period | When the credited outcome relates to |
| Validation and verification status | What has been independently checked |
| Registry information | Where issued units are tracked |
| Retirement process | How the units will be taken out of circulation |
| Permanence provisions | How reversal risk is managed |
| Community and safeguard information | Who participates and how social and environmental risks are addressed |
| Benefit-sharing model | How project revenue reaches participants |
| CCP status, where claimed | Exactly what programme, methodology, category or units support the description |
For a serious corporate purchase, I would expect those facts to be easy to find in the proposal or supporting project documentation.
Not pages of reassurance. The actual project, methodology, units and evidence.
A good carbon credit can still support a bad claim
There are two jobs here.
One is choosing a credible carbon credit.
The other is describing what you have done with it accurately.
Flights are where that second job goes wrong most often, and the advertising regulator upheld a ruling against an airline over it in July 2026. I cover that case, and what it means for anyone offsetting flight emissions, in a separate article.
Buying a carbon credit does not make the emissions in your company’s greenhouse-gas inventory disappear. If your business emitted 1,000 tonnes and subsequently funded 1,000 tonnes of climate action elsewhere, the original 1,000 tonnes were still emitted.
SBTi has a name for that second activity, beyond value chain mitigation, and keeps it separate from a company’s own reductions on purpose. Version 2.0 of its Standard adds a formal route for that finance, called Ongoing Emissions Responsibility, and our guide to SBTi carbon-credit requirements sets out what it asks of a credit.
I think companies are better served by being very clear about that.
Our guide to carbon offsetting for business sets out how I would rather describe the purchase.
The UK Government’s principles for voluntary carbon and nature market integrity put the sequence sensibly: take ambitious action within your own value chain, use high-integrity credits, disclose their use and make accurate environmental claims. Read the UK Government principles.
VCMI’s Claims Code of Practice similarly positions carbon credits above and beyond science-aligned emissions reductions rather than as a substitute for them. Read the VCMI Claims Code.
My own version is simpler.
Cut the emissions you can sensibly cut. Measure what remains. Then use good carbon finance to do something worthwhile beyond your value chain, and say exactly what you have done.
There is no need to make the claim bigger than the action.
How C Level chooses carbon credits
C Level has worked in carbon and nature finance since 2000.
We made a choice early on to concentrate on regenerative, community-led projects rather than build a shop containing every available type of carbon credit.
Our carbon portfolio today is centred on Plan Vivo projects such as CommuniTree in Nicaragua, where smallholder farmers grow trees on their own land and build long-term value from the forests they establish.
When we assess a project, we look at the carbon methodology, monitoring and verification.
But I also want to know what is happening beyond the carbon spreadsheet.
Who owns the land? Who grows the trees? Does the ecology improve? How does the money reach the people doing the work? What gives them a reason to maintain the trees in 10 or 20 years’ time?
I don’t regard those as separate questions.
A regenerative carbon project has to work as carbon accounting, as ecology and as a piece of local economics. If one of those falls apart, I would want to understand why before putting it in front of a client.
High-integrity carbon credit checklist
Before you buy, I would want clear answers to these questions:
- What carbon outcome am I buying: removal, reduction or avoided emissions?
- Which carbon-crediting programme governs it?
- Which methodology produced the carbon outcome?
- Why is the project additional?
- How is the carbon benefit quantified and monitored?
- How is reversal risk managed?
- How is leakage addressed?
- What has actually been independently validated or verified?
- How are issued units recorded and retired?
- Who owns, manages and benefits from the project?
- What environmental and social safeguards apply?
- If a CCP claim is being made, what exactly has CCP status?
- What are you going to say publicly about the purchase, and does the evidence support it?
Once you can answer those questions, the choice becomes much more tangible.
You are no longer comparing logos and price-per-tonne figures. You are comparing actual carbon outcomes, real projects and the people responsible for delivering them.
That is the carbon market I want C Level to be part of.
High-integrity carbon credit FAQs
The short test is three questions. What produced the tonne? Who checked it independently? Where was it retired on a registry? If the seller cannot answer all three, I would keep looking, whatever the logo on the certificate says.
For a nature project I would add a fourth: who is paid to keep the land restored once the carbon has been sold?
No.
Carbon credits can represent removals, emissions reductions or avoided emissions. A removal takes carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. An avoided-emissions credit represents emissions that were expected but did not occur.
I would always establish which one I was buying.
The CCP label is designed by ICVCM as an independent benchmark for high-integrity carbon credits, but the terminology needs to be precise.
Programme eligibility alone does not mean every credit issued by that programme carries a CCP label. The relevant methodology or category and the individual units must meet the applicable ICVCM requirements.
Buying carbon credits does not normally make the emissions in your own greenhouse-gas inventory disappear.
Companies should continue to report and reduce their own emissions, while accounting separately and accurately for any carbon credits or beyond-value-chain climate action they fund.
Not necessarily.
Price can reflect the type of project, location, monitoring costs, community payments, supply, demand, vintage and many other factors.
I would examine the carbon outcome, methodology and project first. Price tells you what the credit costs. It does not tell you whether the underlying climate outcome is sound.
At minimum, I would ask for the project, carbon-crediting programme, methodology, carbon outcome, relevant vintage or monitoring period, validation and verification status, registry details, retirement arrangements and any claimed CCP status.
For a nature project, I would also want to understand land rights, community participation, safeguards and benefit sharing.
Sources and methodology
This article draws primarily on standard-setting bodies, government guidance and programme documentation. Where Plan Vivo requirements or processes are described, Plan Vivo is identified as the source. ICVCM is used independently for the current Core Carbon Principles assessment status of PV Climate.
- Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market, Core Carbon Principles. Primary source for the ten principles, programme assessment and methodology or category assessment. View the principles.
- Integrity Council, CCP-Eligible programme decisions for BioCarbon Standard, Cercarbono and Plan Vivo (PV Climate), 4 August 2026. Primary source for the PV Climate eligibility decision and its conditions. View the announcement.
- Integrity Council, decision on current renewable-energy methodologies. Primary source for the decision that credits from those methodologies would not receive the CCP label. View the decision.
- UK Government, principles for voluntary carbon and nature market integrity. Primary source for the hierarchy of value-chain action, high-integrity credit use, disclosure and claims. View the principles.
- Voluntary Carbon Markets Integrity Initiative, Claims Code of Practice. Guidance on credible corporate claims involving voluntary carbon credits. View the code.
- Oxford Principles for Net Zero Aligned Carbon Offsetting, Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment. Source for reducing emissions first and progressively shifting towards removals and durable storage as organisations approach net zero. View the principles.
- Plan Vivo, PV Climate certification process. Plan Vivo’s description of reporting, validation and third-party verification. View the process.
- Plan Vivo, buying credits and the PV Climate registry. Plan Vivo’s information on its S&P Global-managed registry. View the registry information.
- Plan Vivo, About Us. Plan Vivo’s statement that at least 60% of revenue generated from Plan Vivo Certificate sales goes back to local communities. View the requirement.