Which carbon credits are real?
CarbonDecode rates every project in the voluntary carbon market on a transparent, audit-ready integrity scale, then reads the documents, the news, and the satellites to back the rating up.
12,040 projects rated · 78.5% investment-grade
A carbon credit is a claim, not a commodity.
Two credits with the same registry stamp can sit far apart on integrity. Most of the market clears a defensible floor; very little of it rates as excellent, and a tail of large, low-rated projects carries a disproportionate share of issued credits.
Buyers, brokers, auditors, and (under the EU’s Empowering Consumers Directive) marketers now need defensible, auditable evidence that a credit represents a real tonne. CarbonDecode is that evidence: a rating you can defend line-by-line, plus the primary documents, news, and Earth-observation behind it.
Distribution of ratings
Show Your Work
We went looking for the paperwork behind the market's biggest projects. Correction: the headline availability figure has been withdrawn; our automated search could not see the registries' own document records. The method, the correction and the re-run are set out here.
One rating.
Four kinds of evidence.
CCP-aligned integrity score
A 0–100 composite and AAA–D grade across six CCP dimensions. Every point traces to a documented rule, defensible.
AI analyst, cited
Live research surfaces controversies, registry holds, and ratings-agency downgrades, each with a dated source.
Reads the project documents
Pulls the project's design, monitoring and verification documents from the registry record where available, reads them, and tests the additionality argument and baseline against the methodology.
Satellite & MRV review
Forest-loss reversals and emissions anomalies from open satellite data for the project area.
Monitor your holdings
Save or upload a portfolio of credits and get an exposure-weighted risk view, what’s below grade, what carries critical flags.
Data API + MCP
Query data programmatically, or plug it straight into Claude and ChatGPT via the Model Context Protocol.
Size is not a quality signal.
The largest projects by issuance that currently score below investment grade on our rubric, from public registry data alone.
| Grade | Score | Project | Type | Country | Issued |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| C | 19 | Merit Energy Geo-Seq Carbon Capture & Enhanced Oil Recovery · United States | Carbon Capture & Enhanced Oil Recovery | United States | 7.3M |
| C | 19 | North Country LFG Landfill Methane · United States | Landfill Methane | United States | 1.6M |
| C | 19 | Cumberland Forest Highlands IFM Improved Forest Management · United States | Improved Forest Management | United States | 3.2M |
| C | 19 | White Mountain Apache Tribe Forest Carbon Project II Improved Forest Management · United States | Improved Forest Management | United States | 6.0M |
| C | 19 | Finite Carbon - Passamaquoddy Tribe IFM Improved Forest Management · United States | Improved Forest Management | United States | 4.2M |
| C | 19 | Forest Carbon Partners - Mescalero Apache Tribe Improved Forest Management Project Improved Forest Management · United States | Improved Forest Management | United States | 3.9M |
Rate with conviction.
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