Show Your Work
We went looking for the paperwork behind the market's biggest projects. Half of them have no publicly findable Project Design Document, and whether a project can show its work has nothing to do with its grade.
Based on document searches of 770 of the market's largest projects by issuance · 5 min read
- — We tried to find the primary documents for 770 of the market's largest projects. 52% (398) have no publicly findable Project Design Document.
- — These are the biggest, most-transacted projects, the ones you'd expect to be best documented.
- — Document availability doesn't track the grade: projects with a findable PDD average 59, without 59. A rating tells you nothing about whether you can inspect the project.
- — Transparency and integrity are separate axes, but the market assumes “verified” = “inspectable.”
We went looking for the paperwork
A carbon credit is a claim about a tonne, and the evidence for that claim lives in a project's documents: the Project Design Document, the validation and verification reports, the monitoring records. So we did what a diligent buyer would do, at scale: for 770 of the largest projects by issuance, we searched for those primary documents and tried to read them.
For 52% of them, the single most important document, the PDD, could not be found in the public domain at all. Not behind a clear link on the registry, not on the developer's site, nowhere a focused search would reach. For the market's flagship projects, the foundational evidence is simply not there to inspect.
Share of the 770 searched projects for which we could locate each document type publicly.
Transparency is not integrity
You might assume the best-rated projects are also the best-documented. They aren't. Projects with a findable PDD average 59 on our integrity scale; those without, 59, effectively the same. Whether a project can show its work is unrelated to how it scores.
That matters because the market collapses the two. “Verified” and “registered” get treated as if they meant “you can check this.” They don't. A credit can carry a respectable grade and a registry stamp while the evidence behind it stays out of reach, which is precisely the situation a buyer should want to avoid.
What we do about it
When we can find a project's documents, we don't just read them, we collect and host them, so the primary evidence is one click away rather than lost to a dead link. Every document we locate is attached to the project's page and kept accessible. Where a document genuinely isn't public, we say so plainly rather than imply an assessment we couldn't make. The rating is built on a transparent, documented rubric; the documents are the receipts.
Ask a project to show its work
Browse any project's rating and the primary documents behind it, free.