Over the years, several independent organizations and initiatives have been established to evaluate and accredit carbon crediting programs. In some cases, these organizations were formed to provide greater assurance for voluntary buyers, by assessing and recognizing crediting programs that meet defined standards for governance, oversight, and standards development. In other cases, regulatory bodies – like the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) – have developed standards for recognizing crediting programs that are eligible to serve the Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA).
Examples:
The International Carbon Reduction and Offset Alliance (ICROA) is an industry trade group established to promote best practices within the voluntary carbon market. Purchasing credits from ICROA endorsed crediting programs can offer buyers the assurance that thresholds for program operations and management have been met. ICROA requirements include: demonstration of a program’s independence from conflict of interest, markets, and project developers; effective governance practices; the use of a registry tracking system; public availability of information and transparency of procedures; the use of third-party auditors to review individual projects as well as procedures for auditor oversight; the use of carbon crediting principles to inform standard requirements; the consideration of stakeholder views through the program’s development and operation; and a requirement that each program surpasses a scale threshold of listed projects (>2) and issued credits (>100,000tCO2e).
Serving mainly North American buyers, the Green-e Climate program provides “independent oversight of marketing and sales, [so that] buyers can be sure they are getting what they paid for.”[1] Green-e has endorsed four carbon crediting programs to date for which credits may be eligible for the Green-e Climate label including the Gold Standard, VCS, CAR, and ACR. The Green-e label conveys chain-of-custody certification for the carbon credit – meaning that the credit’s chain of custody pathway from project implementation and credit issuance to the project developer via a registry system, through any transactions between intermediary credit brokers, traders, or exchanges, to the ultimate use and retirement of the credit in the registry tracking system has been recorded accurately and supports the exclusive claim of the credit by the buyer.
The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) proposed a goal to achieve carbon neutral growth in international aviation beyond 2020 in 2010. In 2016 it began development of a market-based mechanism – the CORSIA – to realize this goal. The CORSIA program[2] identifies existing carbon crediting programs from which airlines may source carbon credits to comply with carbon neutral growth requirements. However, in some cases CORSIA also further restricts eligibility of credits to those derived from approved project types or methodologies (see Buying credits from projects certified against independently assessed, higher-quality methodologies).
Pros: These kinds of recognition programs help to distinguish crediting programs with credible standards and governance systems from those that may be less reliable. For example, they typically ensure that recognized crediting programs are free from conflicts of interest, e.g., they do not certify and then directly sell credits to buyers.
Cons: Even within established crediting programs, there can be significant variations in quality among different project types (and even between specific registered projects). Buying carbon credits from a recognized program helps to avoid serious credibility challenges, but is not a guarantee of buying higher-quality credits.
[1] https://www.green-e.org/programs/climate
[2] For more information regarding how the CORSIA program functions see this report.