A webinar from Abatable on what market participants need to know and be ready for in this pivotal year for the changing voluntary carbon market.
In 2025, the voluntary carbon market (VCM) is evolving fast – and many organisations, including corporate buyers, are struggling to keep up. Amid shifting standards, fluctuating prices, and increasing scrutiny, there is increasing pressure on the market to supply credits that match the demands of corporate buyers for higher integrity.
Abatable and our expert panel explored the new standards of integrity in the market and what they mean for carbon credit buyers.
The webinar was hosted online at 2 PM BST on the 20th of May 2025.
Your questions – answered
Due to the high number of questions during the Q&A section of the webinar we were not able to answer all of them live. Our panelists have followed up with thoughts on the most highly requested topics:
Q: As there is quite a large number of methodologies yet to be assessed by IC-VCM, will aligning the project execution to CCP be enough to convince corporate demand in the market?
A: One of the preconditions for a return in corporate demand is confidence in high integrity. That is the part that IC-VCM is playing in delivering a scalable market.
Q: Based on the Core Carbon Principles, what should guide countries like Costa Rica in setting national policies for corresponding adjustments under Article 6.4 to ensure environmental integrity, additionality, transparency, and inclusive benefit-sharing across all carbon project types?
A: We understand the question to be about how countries can make use of the Core Carbon Principles and CCP-labelled credits. The 10 Core Carbon Principles address all of the above issues (environmental integrity, additionality, transparency and benefit sharing) and more, and the IC-VCM assures these are all achieved by independent carbon crediting programmes and the methodologies they adopt.
These programmes operate in the same way as the Paris Agreement Article 6.4 mechanism. This means countries can allow CCP-labelled credits to be used to contribute to NDCs (by authorising them) and refer to the IC-VCM Assessment Framework in UNFCCC reporting to explain how the country is meeting the requirements under Article 6, paragraph 2. The IC-VCM CCPs enable independent supply of high-integrity carbon credits to be leveraged by countries for their NDC in this way.
Q: Would there be any additional benefit for having Article 6 compliant credits over CPP labelled?
A: We understand ‘Article 6 compliant’ to mean credits that will be ‘authorised’ under Article 6 accounting rules. Article 6 ‘authorisation’ and related ‘corresponding adjustments’ are an accounting tool within country-to-country UN climate accounting. The accounting does not address the quality of the specific credit. Only countries and airlines operating under CORSIA rules need authorised carbon credits. Corporates do not need authorised carbon credits. Corporates should ensure they have high-integrity carbon credits, which means they meet the Core Carbon Principles (CCP labelled), as these are the fundamentals for integrity.
Q: Has there been a shift in the KPIs / key labels that buyers look for to make informed purchasing decisions?
A: Buyers are still broadly relying on doing due diligence on the credits and/or using ratings agencies to help them make more informed decisions. They are increasingly looking for CCP-labelled credits, though conscious that not many exist in the market yet and so this transition will still take a little more time.
Q: Why are carbon removal projects seen as higher quality? Can we only remove emissions and continue to emit?
A: The shift of focus towards removals has been part of the shift to net zero from carbon neutrality. Under net zero, only removals can be used to offset residual emissions. However, high-integrity avoidance projects can still contribute significantly to global efforts to reduce emissions and are still used for carbon neutrality claims.
The quality issue is separate, but they are often talked about together and conflated. There was a history of avoidance credits overcrediting, they had overly generous baselines that were not adjusted and so were issued more credits than the project actually delivered. These issues were highlighted in multiple newspaper articles that indicated the whole (avoidance) market was poor quality. A lot of effort has been done and is still underway to ensure both removals and avoidance credits represent high quality, and this will continue.