Rating agency and general market insider Sylvera published a report ”The State of Carbon Credits 2024” to summarise the events of the previous year. Notably, the market as a whole has stagnated in the past 4 years, and companies are beginning to focus more on quality than price, which has resulted in the average price per tonne paid increasing.

Verra is still the dominant standard, with 64% of credits retired last year being issued from a Verra methodology, followed by Gold Standard at 20%. When using a category approach, credits generated from REDD+ and renewable energy projects both took up 29% of market retirements, which reflects the reality that these categories are also issuing the most credits. For over a decade, the market has been dominated by Verra and Gold Standard, but specialized alternatives do exist and they are slowly expanding within their niche.

Contrary to the slightly negative picture painted of the whole VCM, the Plan Vivo annual report for 2024 shows every metric pointing in a positive direction as their ‘Scale with Care’ strategy continues to take effect. This means more projects, more land under management, more trees planted and ultimately more money to communities.

The fact that the Plan Vivo has specialised in their niche explains why at almost 30 years old, they still only occupy less than 2% of the total issuance on the VCM. However, after the previous year of growth, Plan Vivo now holds one third of the market for community-based land-use and forestry projects. Projects are now being certified under the new Plan Vivo Version 5 standard that includes additional methods to ensure the durability of carbon storage and accuracy of credits issued. This adds another layer of certainty to the knowledge that one Plan Vivo Certificate is equal to one tonne of carbon removed from the atmosphere or prevented from going there.

Alongside the accelerated action with carbon projects, Plan Vivo has created a pioneering biodiversity standard with nine projects in the pipeline. While the biodiversity market is still quite new, many organisations are seeing the potential role it can play to increase funding to areas that are of high nature value, but store little carbon such as grasslands or seascapes.

We at ZeroMission are going into 2025 confident that despite the volatility in the market around us, we are on the right path and heading towards where we need to be. We have been the exclusive Scandinavian supplier of many Plan Vivo projects since we were founded in 2006, and we look forward to the continued evolution of our partnership with Plan Vivo, who in their own words remain small but mighty.

Read more:

Plan Vivo annual report 2024 

Sylvera “State of the Carbon Credits 2024”