The Emerging Consensus on Social Integrity in Carbon Markets

A carbon credit represents one metric ton of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO₂e) avoided, reduced, or removed through a project or program that operates among people, communities, institutions, and cultural contexts. This operational relationship means that the overall performance—or quality—of a carbon project is intertwined with how it affects the communities and social settings in which it operates.

To reliably deliver high-integrity carbon credits, the carbon market has long iterated on how to institutionalize the rules, data expectations, and other best practices that deliver three core pillars of integrity:

1. Carbon integrity: Can we trust that the emissions impact is additional and measurable?
2. Social integrity: Can we trust how the project engages local communities, benefits those who participate, and respects the rights of those involved?
3. Good governance: Can we trust the institutions responsible for delivering and overseeing the carbon and social outcomes?

These dimensions are distinct but interconnected. Carbon integrity underpins confidence that a credit reflects a credible climate outcome. Good governance supports both credible climate claims and social performance. Social integrity can affect how well a project anticipates risk, reflects local realities, and implements its emissions-related activities as intended through the project lifecycle. Together, the three provide a fuller account of project integrity.

In recent years, the market has navigated numerous public debates and built new institutions to increase its ability to reliably deliver carbon integrity. But its approach to social integrity has often been called out, including by RMI. Many projects default to a “do-no-harm” approach rather than upholding higher standards for social impact. In the past year, the market has gained critical momentum that will help ensure that social integrity is being built into the rules, buyer diligence, and data systems that shape carbon projects.

We want to celebrate and reflect on the four developments that drove this shift.

Responsive relationships are the connective tissue of social integrity

At its core, social integrity concerns how projects understand, manage, and remain accountable for their effects on the people and places impacted during the life of a project. It is reflected in a wide range of project activities, such as how the project engages affected stakeholders, respects cultural and human rights, shares project revenue or benefits, and provides access to grievance mechanisms and acts to provide remedies, if needed.

Today, core market actors—such as standards, buyers, market-governance bodies, and data initiatives—are evaluating a project’s social integrity using the same overarching questions:

• Were affected stakeholders meaningfully engaged?
• Were land, resources, and customary rights understood?
• Were human rights and labor standards respected and advanced?
• How were risks and benefits shared?
• Are there accessible and safe ways for participants to raise concerns?
• How does the project respond when something goes wrong?

To better understand how these questions shape actual project design, RMI surveyed existing research and spoke to experts working across the voluntary carbon market (VCM), including project developers, buyers, philanthropic groups, and community-based organizations. One theme stood out across these conversations: when projects build relationships with stakeholders early and proactively maintain them as the project evolves, people are more willing to raise concerns, work through challenges with project teams, and stay engaged throughout the project. When relationships are weak, unheard concerns can deepen tensions and opportunities to adjust course are more easily missed.

One key driver of strong relationships is a project’s approach to stakeholder engagement. Consistent stakeholder engagement creates opportunities for communities to be heard and holds project teams accountable for incorporating that feedback. But stakeholder engagement is not a proxy for social integrity as a whole: rights protections, benefit sharing, and access to remedy mechanisms still require documentation and evidence. A clean cooking project, for example, may distribute the intended number of stoves but struggle to sustain use if household concerns about cost, fuel availability, or daily routines are not heard and addressed. In that case, how the project works with households affects whether its climate impact holds over time.

What has changed across the market

The principles behind social integrity in carbon markets have drawn on decades of development and rights-based practice. However, in earlier VCM practice, guidance and requirements were generalized and inconsistent, making it harder to quantify, verify, and compare information across project types. What has changed is that social integrity is becoming a shared agenda across parts of the market that approach quality from different angles. For example, the Verified Carbon Market Collaborative reflects that alignment, bringing together organizations and experts working across development, standard-setting, and ratings. The broader shift is visible in four developments.

1. Standards and market institutions are translating social integrity into clearer quality requirements

Verra’s Verified Carbon Standard Version 5.0 is one concrete example. It makes many expectations more explicit and structured:

• Stakeholder engagement: requires engagement before a project starts, a stakeholder engagement plan tailored to different groups, and a publicly available tracker showing how stakeholder input influenced project design or implementation.
• Land and resource rights: requires projects to consider the actual tenure context, including customary, overlapping, or competing claims, when establishing their rights to operate and claim carbon benefits.
• Risk assessment: requires projects to assess environmental, social, and governance risks upfront, then monitor and manage those risks throughout the project, adapting mitigation measures as conditions or impacts change.

At the market-governance level, the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market’s Core Carbon Principles likewise place sustainable development benefits and safeguards alongside quantification, additionality, permanence, and other core criteria for high-integrity credits. Similar expectations are also appearing beyond the voluntary market, with social safeguards and pre-project engagement becoming key focus areas under the Paris Agreement’s Article 6.4 mechanism.

2. Buyers are incorporating social integrity into due diligence

We have seen a similar shift from the buyer side. In RMI’s work with buyers to develop a common template for carbon credit procurement, buyers frequently voiced that they expect clear evidence behind social integrity claims in the form of payment structures, grievance records, monitoring methods, and details about how decisions are made. This brings social integrity into routine screening and diligence early in the procurement process. This focus helps buyers test whether social integrity is reflected in project design and governance, identify where further diligence is needed, and carry those findings into purchasing decisions. In our conversations, buyers said that robust evidence of social commitments helped projects secure an offtake agreement or be competitive for one.

3. Buyers are increasingly capable of discerning social integrity in the context of each project

In RMI’s work with buyers, we have seen them use detailed requests for proposals (RFPs) and procurement questionnaires or hire specialized experts to add more judgment and depth to diligence on the social issues, risks, and relationships most relevant to an individual project. This matters because carbon projects operate in very different social, legal, and institutional settings, so the questions that warrant closer scrutiny can differ substantially. For a land-based project, buyers may look closely at who holds land and resource rights and whether—and how—consent is obtained. For an engineered removal project, the relevant questions may instead center on siting, construction, or impacts on nearby communities.

4. Social integrity is becoming more visible in how individual projects are understood and assessed

Better rules and better questions only go so far if the underlying information is difficult to find. RMI’s Carbon Crediting Data Framework (CCDF) embeds socio-environmental information within the same project-data architecture used for emissions and project design information. The Carbon Data Open Protocol includes a common data structure through which different kinds of co-benefit information, including social integrity data, can be consistently represented and exchanged across the market. Independent ratings provide project-level analysis and insight that complement broader program- and methodology-level integrity frameworks, including on factors relevant to social and environmental impacts and benefits. This can help buyers identify differences in risk and performance among individual projects.

These developments are bringing social integrity more clearly into view at the individual-project level: data systems are making social integrity evidence easier to find and exchange, while independent assessments are creating additional ways for buyers to interpret the evidence and form a deeper view of overall project quality.

From stronger expectations to better practice

The market now has stronger standards and tools for recognizing social integrity—we see this in standards defining clearer expectations, RFPs asking more detailed questions and requiring stronger evidence, data systems bringing social information into project-level records, and independent assessments helping interpret what it means in context. These developments are making social integrity a more deliberate and inseparable part of how carbon credit quality is assessed.

The opportunity now is to pursue project development and diligence in a way that supports both trustworthy climate action and community participation. Project teams can begin by giving affected people a meaningful role in design, implementation, and governance of carbon projects. Buyers can reinforce those efforts by giving good social performance meaningful weight in their purchasing decisions.

With many projects already demonstrating thoughtful approaches to stakeholder engagement, RMI is excited to explore these stories in its next article and show the market what is achievable in different contexts and what buyers can look for to recognize strong engagement practices.