The State of Carbon-Credit Integrity
We rated every project in the voluntary carbon market. 78% clear the investment-grade bar, but almost none are excellent.
Based on CarbonDecode's ratings of 11,521 projects · registry data as of 2026-04 · 6 min read
- — 78.4% of credits are "investment grade" (BBB+) — but that's the floor, not a badge of quality.
- — Just 2 of 11,521 projects earn a AA rating, and none earn AAA. Genuine excellence is vanishingly rare.
- — A 34-point integrity gap separates the best and worst project types. Type is destiny.
- — The lowest-rated projects are the biggest: below-investment-grade megaprojects account for tens of millions of issued credits.
The quality illusion
On paper, the voluntary carbon market looks healthy: 78.4% of the 11,521 projects we rate clear the investment-grade bar (BBB or higher). But "investment grade" is a floor, not a mark of excellence — and once you look past it, the picture inverts.
Only 2 projects — out of 11,521 — reach AA, and not a single one reaches AAA. Two-thirds of the entire market (66.3%) sits at exactly BBB: barely-passable, defensible-but-unremarkable credits. The market isn't mostly junk; it's mostly mediocre, with almost nothing genuinely excellent and a hard tail of the distressed.
Type is destiny
Integrity isn't distributed randomly — it tracks the kind of project. Metered industrial abatement, where a tonne is measured at a stack, dominates the top. Land-use and behavioral credits, where baselines are modeled and reversals loom, cluster at the bottom. Among the market's most common project types, average integrity spans a 34-point range.
| Project type | Avg. score | Projects |
|---|---|---|
| Ozone Depleting Substances Recovery & Destruction | 72 | 346 |
| Landfill Methane | 69 | 441 |
| Manure Methane Digester | 67 | 502 |
| Clean Water | 66 | 423 |
| Community Boreholes | 65 | 384 |
| Biomass | 64 | 302 |
| Solar - Centralized | 63 | 370 |
| Wind | 63 | 1,027 |
| Cookstoves | 63 | 1,712 |
| Hydropower | 61 | 538 |
| Afforestation/Reforestation | 58 | 754 |
| Improved Forest Management | 55 | 1,120 |
| Sustainable Agriculture | 54 | 266 |
| REDD+ | 51 | 338 |
| Rice Emission Reductions | 38 | 392 |
The lesson for buyers: the label "carbon credit" flattens a 30-point quality range. A metered destruction credit and a modeled avoided-deforestation credit are not the same asset, and no registry logo tells you which is which — the type and its evidence do.
The junk is oversized
The market's worst credits aren't fringe. The lowest-rated large projects — each with over a million issued credits — include some of the most-transacted names in the market, among them REDD+ and improved-forest-management projects that later became integrity case studies.
| Grade | Score | Project | Type | Issued |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| C | 19 | Merit Energy Geo-Seq | Carbon Capture & Enhanced Oil Recovery | 7.3M |
| C | 19 | North Country LFG | Landfill Methane | 1.6M |
| C | 19 | Cumberland Forest Highlands IFM | Improved Forest Management | 3.2M |
| C | 19 | White Mountain Apache Tribe Carbon Project II | Improved Forest Management | 5.6M |
| C | 19 | Finite Carbon - Passamaquoddy Tribe IFM | Improved Forest Management | 4.1M |
| C | 19 | Forest Carbon Partners - Mescalero Apache Tribe Improved Forest Management Project | Improved Forest Management | 3.9M |
| C | 19 | Chugach Alaska Forest Carbon Project | Improved Forest Management | 6.8M |
| CC | 29 | Boa Vista A/R | Afforestation/Reforestation | 2.6M |
| CC | 29 | KARIBA REDD+ PROJECT | REDD+ | 29M |
| CC | 29 | Isangi REDD+ Project | REDD+ | 1.4M |
Because these projects are large, their weight in the market — and in the average buyer's portfolio — far exceeds their count. Screening on integrity isn't a tail-risk exercise; it's a first-order one.
How these ratings are built
Every project is scored 0–100 and graded AAA–D across six CCP-aligned dimensions — additionality, over-crediting risk, permanence, MRV & methodology rigor, double-counting, and co-benefits — using a transparent, documented rubric. Unlike closed ratings, every point traces to a rule you can inspect, and every project in the market is rated and free to browse. Data derives from public registry records (the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project) plus the registries themselves, refreshed as new data publishes.
See the ratings for yourself
Every project, every score, free to browse — or pull the data programmatically.