LOST IN DOCUMENTATION

The report evaluates transparency in the voluntary carbon market (VCM) by analyzing a sample of 140 projects across the Verified Carbon Standard (VCS), Gold Standard (GS), American Carbon Registry (ACR), and Climate Action Reserve (CAR). It finds that no single standard provides full disclosure, with significant gaps caused by both inadequate rule-setting and insufficient enforcement. Specifically, CAR and ACR have structural limitations regarding the public disclosure of monitoring reports. The study also identifies widespread issues with mislabelled, duplicated, or missing documents, which rating agencies confirm hinder the independent assessment of carbon credit quality. The report recommends implementing stronger quality assurance/quality control (QA/QC) processes, standardized naming conventions, and regular audits to align with Integrity Council for Voluntary Carbon Markets (ICVCM) requirements.

• No major voluntary carbon market standard provides full disclosure of project documentation, although transparency levels vary significantly between them.
• The analysis of 140 projects revealed a total of 444 missing project documents, with issues stemming from both a lack of mandatory disclosure rules and a failure to enforce existing rules.
• Structural transparency limitations exist in the ACR and CAR registries; CAR does not mandate public disclosure of monitoring reports, and ACR only requires it for reporting periods ending after July 1, 2023.
• When evaluating only documents mandated for disclosure by all standards (Project Design Documents, Validation Reports, and Verification Reports), VCS was the best performer with 0.39 missing documents per project, followed by CAR (0.44), ACR (0.64), and GS (0.74).
• An average of 51% of credit batches lacked a corresponding monitoring report across the sample, though this drops to 5.6% when limited to standards that actually mandate their publication (GS and VCS).
• Registry documentation is frequently plagued by administrative errors, including mislabelled or mis-categorised files, duplicates, and incorrect project locations, particularly within the Gold Standard registry.
• Feedback from rating agencies (BeZero, Calyx Global, and Sylvera) confirms that missing or outdated documentation complicates the rating process and that there is a lack of clear communication channels for requesting missing data.

APA

Wyburd, I., & Dufrasne, G. (2024). LOST IN DOCUMENTATION. Carbon Market Watch. https://carbonmarketwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/CMW-Lost-in-Documentation-Transparency-in-voluntary-carbon-market-registries.pdf

Chicago

Wyburd, Inigo, and Gilles Dufrasne. LOST IN DOCUMENTATION. Carbon Market Watch, 2024. https://carbonmarketwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/CMW-Lost-in-Documentation-Transparency-in-voluntary-carbon-market-registries.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |last1=Wyburd |first1=Inigo |last2=Dufrasne |first2=Gilles |title=LOST IN DOCUMENTATION |publisher=Carbon Market Watch |date=March 2024 |url=https://carbonmarketwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/CMW-Lost-in-Documentation-Transparency-in-voluntary-carbon-market-registries.pdf |access-date=23 October 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{wyburd2024lost, author = {Wyburd, Inigo and Dufrasne, Gilles}, title = {{LOST IN DOCUMENTATION}}, institution = {Carbon Market Watch}, year = {2024}, month = mar, url = {https://carbonmarketwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/CMW-Lost-in-Documentation-Transparency-in-voluntary-carbon-market-registries.pdf}, urldate = {2026-10-23}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }