Carbon credits are not a typical commodity.

Although crediting programs provide some assurance, purchasing higher-quality carbon credits is not as simple as buying any “certified” credit issued by a crediting program. Some credit buyers can invest the time and resources to research and discover good projects and procure higher-quality credits. For many (if not most) buyers, that approach is not realistic. This section describes – and assesses the pros and cons of – some strategies for steering clear of lower-quality carbon credits.

Most reliable methods

The following approaches for avoiding lower-quality carbon credits are the most effective. These approaches rely upon quality assessment by actors with significant technical expertise. Still, these methods are not a guarantee against lower-quality and should be pursued carefully and with attention to specific details.

Buying credits from projects rated highly by independent rating services

Carbon credit rating services that rate the quality of individual projects are relatively new to the voluntary carbon market. In line with this guide’s presentation of how to think about carbon credit quality (see What Makes High-Quality Carbon Credits), existing services typically provide nuanced ratings that distinguish relative quality on a sliding scale, often across different criteria and quality dimensions (e.g., additionality, quantification, permanence, exclusive claims, and avoidance of social and environmental harms).

In practice these services interrogate projects in line with (some version of) the recommendations found in vetting carbon crediting projects directly. Some rating services offer bespoke ratings for individual clients.1 Others may team up with specific platforms to make their ratings available, such as the Salesforce Net Zero Marketplace or Allied Offsets which host ratings from three credit rating companies (for some listed projects). In 2023, Carbon Market Watch published a review of existing services and how they conduct their ratings. However, (when this page was published in 2024) all such services were operated as for-profit companies that typically do not divulge the details of their rating methods, nor do they typically make their ratings publicly available.