What is the ICVCM?
The Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market is an independent, non-profit governance body established in 2021 following the Taskforce on Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets (TSVCM), chaired by Mark Carney. Its mandate is to ensure that the voluntary carbon market (VCM) accelerates climate action by setting and maintaining a global threshold standard for carbon credit quality. It is governed by an independent board that includes representatives from climate science, finance, indigenous peoples, and civil society, including members affiliated with EDF, TNC, and other conservation organisations.
The ICVCM operates a two-level assessment process. First, it assesses carbon-crediting programmes, also known as the standards bodies that issue credits, such as Verra, Gold Standard, and ART for programme-level governance, transparency, and tracking against a set of programme-level criteria. Programmes that pass become CCP-Eligible. Second, it assesses individual methodology categories, including the specific rules for how different project types quantify emission reductions or removals against ten Core Carbon Principles (CCPs). Methodologies that pass become CCP-Approved. A carbon credit can only carry the CCP label if it is issued under a CCP-Approved methodology by a CCP-Eligible programme.
The CCP label matters because it provides buyers, regulators, and policymakers with a readily accessible, independently verified signal of high-quality. It is increasingly embedded in corporate procurement standards (SBTi OER requires integrity criteria consistent with CCP quality), referenced in regulatory frameworks, and increasingly used as the bar for market access. ClearBlue Markets and Calyx Global have both observed a price premium for CCP-labelled credits over unlabelled credits in comparable categories, reflecting genuine market recognition of the standard.
CCP-Eligible Programmes
As of August 2026, 13 carbon-crediting programmes have been approved as CCP-Eligible, including ACR (American Carbon Registry), ART TREES, CAR (Climate Action Reserve), Equitable Earth, Gold Standard, GCC (Global Carbon Council), Isometric, Puro.Earth, Rainbow, and Verra VCS. Together, the original five programmes, including ACR, ART, CAR, Gold Standard, and Verra account for approximately 98% of historical market volume by retirements. Cercarbono, the Colombian-headquartered programme with significant Latin American forest project coverage, was approved as CCP-Eligible in August 2026 and has committed to submit five methodologies, including nature-based approaches, for CCP assessment. BioCarbon Standard and Plan Vivo (PV Climate) were approved as CCP-Eligible in the same August 2026 decision; together, CCP-Eligible programmes now represent more than 95% of cumulative voluntary carbon market issuances.
Each CCP-Eligible programme has updated its procedures to comply with the ICVCM’s criteria, including strengthened governance and enhanced transparency on project data, and tightened tracking to prevent double issuance. This programme-level assessment was a first step, but it is methodology-level assessments that determine what gets into the market with a CCP label.
ICVCM has approved a number of forest methodologies including Verra’s VM0047 (for afforestation, reforestation and revegetation (ARR), with its remote-sensing dynamic performance benchmark) and Isometric’s reforestation protocol for ARR; VM0048, Verra’s jurisdictional REDD (JNR) framework and ART TREES for REDD; VM0045 (Verra’s dynamic Improved Forest Management (IFM) methodology) and ACR’s IFM methodology. Importantly, Verra’s older REDD methodologies were not submitted, which cover the majority of REDD credits on the market today, and will never carry the label and must transition to VM0048.
Open as full pageThe next version of the CCP requirements are being developed as Continuous Improvement Work Programs. These include stress-testing pooled buffer reserves, standardising reversal-risk definitions, and assessing novel compensation mechanisms including the Permanence Trust. Alongside sit workstreams on leakage (moving from blanket deductions toward empirical, geography-specific estimates), jurisdictional integrity, and the digital MRV standards that determine whether monitoring claims can be verified at scale.
Open as full page115 million CCP-labelled credits and counting
As of the ICVCM’s August 2026 programme decisions, an estimated 115 million credits had been approved to use the CCP label. As of May 2026, approximately 63 million appeared available in the market and 44 million had been retired or cancelled. In a market that has issued billions of credits over its history, 115 million CCP-labelled credits is a small number. But the pipeline under CCP-approved methodologies is significantly larger, and the trajectory is upward.
The bottleneck for forest carbon specifically is the transition from older REDD methodologies to VM0048 and the JNR framework. Projects must complete requantification under the new methodology rules before their credits can carry the CCP label. That transition takes time and has costs. The commercial incentive, a price premium for CCP-labelled credits, growing market access requirements, and differentiated buyer interest in CCP-quality REDD, is significant, but the transition pipeline is not yet flowing at the scale the market needs, mostly due to slow data release from Verra. The number of projects in development under CCP-approved REDD methodologies represents the future supply; the delay is in converting that pipeline into labelled, issuable credits. Credit issuance may also pick up under ART Trees or Equitable Earth.
ICVCM has taken important steps in establishing that high-quality forest carbon is possible, has approved the methodologies that define what that looks like, and has rejected the methodologies that fell short. That is a necessary foundation towards restoring faith in the market. The CCP label is now the market reference point for integrity, and the process of building demand around it, through SBTi’s OER criteria, CSRD disclosure, and other markets like CORSIA (which doesn’t require CCP labels, but is also focused on high-integrity credits), is well underway.
What the ICVCM has not yet resolved is the foundational technical question that sits beneath every methodology it assesses: the quality of the baseline. The ICVCM’s approval of Isometric’s ISM Reforestation Protocol specifically cited its dynamic baseline as a key integrity feature. Its assessment observations on VM0048 noted the rigour of the additionality test and dynamic baseline approach. This is the right direction. A dynamic baseline worth the name is built the other way up from a projection; legitimately comparable reference areas are selected outside the project and measured through time, and what happens on them becomes the evolving estimate of what would have happened without the project. Because the reference areas keep being measured, the baseline keeps pace with conditions as they change. If the baseline is wrong, the additionality claim is wrong, the permanence buffer is miscalibrated, and the credit doesn’t represent what it claims to represent. Approved ARR methodologies now have this in some form (for example, Verra’s VM0047). What the market has not yet operationalised is an actual dynamic baseline for REDD, including reference areas measured through time to estimate avoided deforestation, rather than baselines set and revisited at intervals. That is the natural next step for the integrity agenda, although it may further complicate financing these projects. Financial innovation needs to sit next to baseline innovation.
belian’s work is exactly this: independent selection of reference areas, and baselines that are measured rather than assumed. The ICVCM can set the standard; whether CCP-approved credits are genuinely high-integrity or only high-integrity in procedure depends on the science and the data behind the baselines used to meet it. Those are not the same thing, and the difference matters for every tonne that enters the market under a CCP label.
Key references
- ICVCM, Core Carbon Principles and Assessment Framework (2023, updated 2024–2026)
- ICVCM, CCP Impact Report 2025 (February 2026)
- ICVCM, Assessment Status — Programmes and Categories (last updated August 2026)
- ICVCM, Governing Board Decision: REDD+ Methodologies (November 2024)
- ICVCM, Governing Board Decision: Reforestation and IFM Methodologies (February 2026)
- ICVCM, Governing Board Decision: May 2026 batch (May 2026)
- ICVCM, Launches Follow-Up Work Program to Refine Permanence Requirements (February 2026)
- ICVCM, CIWP on Permanence: First Report (May 2025)
- ICVCM, Board Observations: IFM Methodology Assessment (2025)
- SHIFT-CM / Nature4Climate, Beyond Buffer Pools: Market Mechanisms for Managing Non-Permanence Risk (working paper, 2026)
- AFF, Kita, Climate Resilient Solutions, “Managing Risk at Market Scale,” Permanence Trust Feasibility Study Preliminary Findings (June 2026)
- Verra, VM0048 Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, v1.0
- Isometric, ISM Reforestation Protocol v1.1 (December 2025)
- Cercarbono, CCP-Eligible programme approval (August 2026)
- VCM.fyi, ICVCM CCP Label Tracker (updated May 2026)
References last reviewed: August 2026.
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