The Widening Gap Between Claim and Carbon

Every time a company pledges to reach net zero, it runs into the same arithmetic. Some of its emissions can be cut directly, by changing how it makes things, powers its buildings or moves its goods. The rest, the part that is expensive or currently impossible to eliminate, has to be dealt with another way. For much of the last decade, that other way has been the voluntary carbon market: a company pays for a credit, each one meant to represent a tonne of carbon dioxide either kept out of the atmosphere or removed from it, often by protecting a forest, planting trees or capturing emissions elsewhere. Buy enough credits, the logic goes, and a firm can balance its own footprint against reductions made somewhere else in the world. It is an elegant idea, and for years it has underpinned a great many corporate climate claims. It is also, increasingly, under the microscope.

The reason is a widening gap in the numbers. Corporate commitments to the market rose sharply in 2026, even as the volume of credits actually retired declined, according to the market-intelligence firm Carbon Direct. The distance between those two figures, ambition rising while action edges lower, is where the market's current story lives.

That distance points to a question of integrity the sector is now confronting directly. An analysis by the carbon-data firm Senken found that the majority of credits trading at public benchmark prices fell short on the standard tests of additionality, baseline accuracy, leakage and permanence, the criteria that determine whether a claimed reduction is real and counted only once. The finding is uncomfortable, but it has also sharpened the industry's appetite for something more rigorous.

Much of the scrutiny has settled on forestry and avoided-deforestation credits, the category most often cited in independent audits and academic research for overstating its climate impact. The stakes are not only atmospheric. The communities living in and around credited forests frequently see little of the revenue these projects generate, yet bear the consequences when a credit's claimed protection proves thinner than advertised. Any credible version of this market will have to account for them as well as for the carbon.

Not all of the market is under strain. High-durability carbon removal is expanding quickly, and newer approaches such as enhanced rock weathering issued their first credits in 2025. Forward agreements to purchase this future capacity now far exceed present-day retirements, which means a growing share of the market is funding capacity that does not yet exist. That imbalance is a genuine risk, and also, read another way, a signal of conviction that better supply is coming.

The ratio captures the enduring tension in offsetting as a climate strategy: it has always been easier to fund a future promise than to verify a present one. The voluntary carbon market did not set out to be so easily gamed. Measuring an avoided tonne of carbon in a standing forest is genuinely hard, and hard things tend to get approximated until the approximation becomes the product on sale. Naming that honestly is the first step toward pricing it properly.

What comes next will likely be defined by a shift in what buyers are willing to pay for. The direction of travel is away from cheap, hard-to-verify avoidance and toward durable, measurable removal, backed by stricter standards and independent verification that treat a tonne as something to be proven rather than assumed. Demand is not disappearing; it is maturing, moving toward credits that can withstand scrutiny and toward projects that share their value with the communities that host them. If that discipline holds, the market's future rests less on the volume of promises it can issue and more on the quality of the outcomes it can stand behind, which is the version of this market that was always worth building.