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 Correction: the headline availability figure has been withdrawn; our automated search could not see the registries' own document records.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.
Originally published September 25, 2026 · headline figure withdrawn October 9, 2026 · 5 min read
We have withdrawn the headline figure (that roughly half of the market's largest projects had no publicly findable Project Design Document) and the chart that accompanied it. They were inaccurate.
The figure came from an automated, AI-assisted public web search: for each project, a search agent tried to locate and read the PDD and the latest monitoring and verification reports, within a fixed search budget, with no login and no browser. A document was recorded as found if the search returned a direct file link we could retrieve. A “not found” result was not reviewed by a person before it was recorded.
That method did not reliably reach the registries' own document records, where most project documents are actually held. When we checked our sample against the registries' records directly, the large majority of projects we had marked as lacking documents had them. The result measured what our tooling could find, not what the market has published.
What we have done: we replaced the search with direct lookups of each registry's own document record, by review period, for Gold Standard, Verra and the Climate Action Reserve, and are backfilling the projects in our sample now; documents appear on each project's page as the backfill reaches it. We will re-run the analysis against registry records and publish the result, whatever it shows.
What the report set out to do
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. We wanted to know how much of that evidence a buyer could actually get to, so we tried to find it, at scale, for the largest projects by issuance. The question is still the right one. Our first attempt at answering it was not good enough.
What still stands
Two things in the original report do not depend on the withdrawn figure. First, our integrity scores have no document inputs: the rating is a deterministic rubric over registry metadata (see the methodology), so nothing about document findability affected any project's grade, in either direction. Second, transparency and integrity are separate axes. “Verified” and “registered” are not the same as “you can check this,” and a buyer should want both. What we can no longer claim is any measurement of how often the second is missing.
What we do about it
When we locate a project's documents, we collect and host them, so the primary evidence is one click away on the project's page. For Gold Standard, Verra and Climate Action Reserve projects that now comes straight from the registry's own document record, organised by review period. Where we cannot locate a document, the page says “not located,” which is all that it means.
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