Dr Irina Fedorenko, Abatable’s Head of Origination and Structuring, outlines the tools available in Abatable’s intelligence platform to help users navigate and understand carbon credit supply in the voluntary carbon market.
When looking at carbon markets, with their thousands of project developers, thousands upon thousands of projects, and myriad project types, registries, and jurisdictions, it is easy to feel a little disoriented.
As a company looking to buy carbon credits, it can be difficult to know where to turn to find the carbon projects that fit your criteria on impact, project type and co-benefits.
At Abatable we help businesses navigate the carbon market. Our solutions allow businesses to get an overview of the carbon credit supply ecosystem and hone in on the carbon credits and projects suited to their needs. Our intelligence platform provides a useful window to the market and includes tools buyers, investors and advisers can use to better understand carbon credit supply.
Supply trends
Understanding supply in the voluntary carbon market (VCM) can help companies gain an informed view to better plan their purchasing decisions. Understanding the supply side of the market is also useful for carbon project developers to explore new project types and potential jurisdictions and stay ahead of the competition.
The supply trends section of our intelligence platform can help businesses seeking carbon credits and carbon project developers alike navigate the carbon market supply ecosystem.
Our supply tools provide an overview of the market, supported by multiple sources of granular data, and allow data querying to achieve an in-depth understanding of the current state of carbon credit supply and future forecasts.
Learn more about our data sources here.
For example, if a platform user wants to understand the aforestation and reforestation project ecosystem, they can explore historical issuances to date and the retirement data for this project type within our platform. They can also check forecasted supply predictions and trends for this type of project supply.
The supply trends section of our platform comprises multiple sections:
Credit issuances and retirements
This section allows users to explore carbon credit issuances, retirements and the surplus of credits in the market by year and project type. Exploring this data, we can see that there has been a strong growth trend in overall carbon credit issuances since the early 2000s, although overall issuances have declined slightly in the past two years.
Users can break issuances down by type of project. Our data indicates that almost 24% of all credit issuances in 2024 came from REDD+ projects, followed closely by renewable energy and improved forest management project types. Over 300mn credits were issued in 2024, while around 160mn credits were retired giving a yearly surplus of around 140mn credits.
Project developer ecosystem
This section provides a deeper understanding of the global carbon project developer landscape. The data comes from 3,600 developers that Abatable tracks regularly and indicates that the market is fairly concentrated, with the top 100 developers issuing over 64% of credits. Pro users of our platform are able to track these top 100 developers by their year-by-year growth of credit issuances.
The charts and data in this section are a live version of the analysis contained in Abatable’s annual Voluntary Carbon Market Developer Overview report. The report also provides more qualitative data for understanding the ecosystem and is free to download on our website.
Funding insights
This dataset compiles funding and deal announcements within the VCM, capturing data from fund commitments, developer and project equity, emission reduction purchase agreements (ERPAs) and public funding. The dataset tracks capital committed and deployed towards the future supply of carbon credits, providing a detailed overview of financial activities.
The investment amount seen in the VCM tripled in 2023, reaching over $77bn, and strong growth was seen in 2024 with over $100bn seen in total carbon funding.
Our funding data is sourced from direct reports from developers and investors, public announcements and climate change news coverage. Looking at the split of deals by project type, a clear trend is evident – engineered carbon removal solutions dominated market investment in 2021–2023, however nature-based projects took the lead in 2024.
Supply forecast
Finally, our supply forecast section looks into the future, allowing users to understand market projections and the expected volumes of various credits. This information can be filtered to get specific forecasts categorised by the status of supply under CORSIA (Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation), the likelihood of credits receiving a Core Carbon Principle label from the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market, project location and the project-level likelihood of credits receiving a corresponding adjustment under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement.
Our forecasts have been developed using the methodologies and principles outlined here.
Zooming into our supplier trends section is useful for planning purchasing decisions as a buyer and understanding your position in the market as a developer. We think there is no better place to access a high-level overview of the market and very detailed project-level information.
Find out more about our intelligence platform here and sign up for a free account here.
Keep an eye out for our carbon market developer overview report for 2024, coming soon.
