Guide 1: HOW TO FIND INFORMATION ON CARBON PROJECTS IN MY COUNTRY?

The document serves as a practical manual for identifying carbon projects within a specific country and evaluating their project documents. It explains the differences between Article 6.2 (decentralised), Article 6.4 (centralised), Voluntary Carbon Markets (VCM), and REDD+ programs. The guide directs users to specific digital tools—such as the UNEP Article 6 pipeline platform, the UC Berkeley Voluntary Registry Offsets Database, and the REDD+ Web Platform—to find project data. It also provides a framework for analysing project documents, focusing on geographic scope, actor roles, timelines, methodologies, and benefit-sharing arrangements, while highlighting industry quality criteria like additionality, leakage, and permanence.

• Carbon projects are categorised into several primary frameworks: Article 6.2 involves direct bilateral or multilateral agreements between countries to transfer Internationally Transferred Mitigation Outcomes (ITMOs); Article 6.4 is a centralised market where projects are registered with the Paris Agreement Crediting Mechanism (PACM) and managed by the UNFCCC Article 6.4 Supervisory Body; Voluntary Carbon Markets (VCM) use independent carbon standards to validate credits; and UN REDD+ is a results-based payment program to incentivise forest preservation.
• Carbon projects vary by scale, which affects governance and information sources: jurisdictional projects cover an entire country or state and are usually government-led; project-based activities are smaller and typically led by developers; and nesting involves smaller projects situated within larger jurisdictional frameworks.
• The guide identifies several key digital repositories for tracking carbon activities: the UNEP Article 6 pipeline platform for Article 6 activities, the UC Berkeley Voluntary Registry Offsets Database for VCM projects from five major registries (ACR, ART, CAR, Gold Standard, and Verra), and the REDD+ Web Platform for forest-related emission reductions.
• Industry good practice for carbon crediting relies on several quality criteria, though the document notes many projects do not reliably uphold them: additionality (whether reductions would have happened without credit revenue), leakage (whether emissions increase elsewhere), permanence (long-term mitigation, typically 40-100 years), baselines (estimates of emissions without the project), double counting prevention, and respect for social impacts including Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC).
• Project analysis should focus on specific documents: the Project Design Document (defines scope and methodology), the Validation Report (assesses if requirements are met), the Monitoring Report (tracks progress), and the Verification Report (confirms compliance and recommends credit issuance).
• Transparency regarding benefit-sharing and financial revenues is often lacking; while some standards like Plan Vivo require livelihood benefit details and Verra's VCS 5.0 is increasing revenue disclosure, there is generally no requirement for developers or brokers to disclose the sale price of credits, and Article 6.2 has no requirement to share financial transfer information between governments.

APA

Iwerks, R., & Dossi, F. (2026). Guide 1: HOW TO FIND INFORMATION ON CARBON PROJECTS IN MY COUNTRY? Carbon Market Watch. https://carbonmarketwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/WEB-CMW-Guide-1-Final-Interactive-compressed.pdf

Chicago

Iwerks, Rebecca, and Federica Dossi. Guide 1: HOW TO FIND INFORMATION ON CARBON PROJECTS IN MY COUNTRY? Carbon Market Watch, 2026. https://carbonmarketwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/WEB-CMW-Guide-1-Final-Interactive-compressed.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |last1=Iwerks |first1=Rebecca |last2=Dossi |first2=Federica |title=Guide 1: HOW TO FIND INFORMATION ON CARBON PROJECTS IN MY COUNTRY? |publisher=Carbon Market Watch |date=July 2026 |url=https://carbonmarketwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/WEB-CMW-Guide-1-Final-Interactive-compressed.pdf |access-date=23 October 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{iwerks2026guide, author = {Iwerks, Rebecca and Dossi, Federica}, title = {{Guide 1: HOW TO FIND INFORMATION ON CARBON PROJECTS IN MY COUNTRY?}}, institution = {Carbon Market Watch}, year = {2026}, month = jul, url = {https://carbonmarketwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/WEB-CMW-Guide-1-Final-Interactive-compressed.pdf}, urldate = {2026-10-23}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }