The voluntary carbon market (VCM) has immense potential to catalyze climate finance at scale but it’s constrained by a persistent market failure: essential information about carbon crediting projects remains static, opaque, and fragmented – undermining efficient and credible quality assessment. RMI’s Carbon Crediting Data Framework (CCDF) is a toolkit and open-source community designed to address this challenge and to drive interoperability, trust, and transparency in the VCM.

While much has been written about the turbulence in the VCM, all stories stem from the same systemic issue: critical information about project design and performance is inconsistent, inaccessible, and difficult to collect, exchange, and analyze. In nearly every transaction, stakeholders navigate a disjointed maze of information in static documents, spreadsheets, proxy metrics, and project narratives just to determine whether the project is delivering on its promised climate impact. The root of this problem is that developers, registries, and service providers lack a common language and standardized format to exchange project data.

The CCDF offers a practical, four-piece toolkit that brings much-needed structure to crediting data. Covering everything from carbon accounting to socio-environmental considerations, the CCDF toolkit lays out a standardized way to collect, present, and interpret carbon credit data. This allows market players to access the right information, in the right format, and at the right time, enabling better decisions and greater confidence in the credits they sell, evaluate, or buy.