Data Standardization Tools and Coalitions

The voluntary carbon market (VCM) has immense potential to catalyze climate finance at scale but it’s constrained by a persistent market failure: critical information about project design and performance is difficult to collect, exchange, and analyze. In nearly every market interaction, stakeholders navigate a disjointed maze of information in static documents or spreadsheets – often with related but not identical requirements for text formats and key definitions. This is a collective market failure – a byproduct of dozens or organizations trying to build their own tools and processes.

To counter this systemic issue, RMI is building open-source tools and coalitions to build consensus for standardized and interoperable market infrastructure. This work started with our Carbon Crediting Data Framework, including a robust examination of the socio-environmental data fields that showcase project impact, and is implemented on the Centigrade platform. It has expanded to include the Carbon Data Open Protocol, a coalition of 75 VCM stakeholders, and the Template for Carbon Credit Procurement, a partnership with the Beyond Alliance.

RMI’s Carbon Crediting Data Framework

A practical, four-piece toolkit, the CCDF provides a standardized format for projects to disclose data ranging from carbon accounting to socio-environmental impact.

Carbon Data Open Protocol (CDOP)

CDOP is a coalition of 75 market actors committed to building a unified data schema for the carbon market. Published schemas are available on the CDOP Github.

Template for Carbon Credit Procurement (TCCP)

A standardized and digitized template to make carbon credit purchases, particularly RFPs, more efficient, transparent, and accessible.

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