Google, Meta, and McKinsey & Company have made a major move in corporate climate action. They signed a long-term deal to remove carbon from the air in Appalachia. The project is run by Living Carbon and focuses on restoring forests on degraded lands. Under this deal, the companies will remove 131,240 tonnes of CO₂ over the next ten years.
A New Deal for Climate
The effort targets a much larger problem. Across the United States, about 1.6 million acres of abandoned mine land remain damaged by past mining. These lands often have poor soil, erosion, toxic metals, and invasive species that block natural regrowth.
In addition, around 30 million acres of degraded agricultural land could be restored through reforestation. Appalachia is one of the hardest-hit regions due to decades of coal mining.
The deal is backed by the Symbiosis Coalition, a group of buyers that funds high-quality carbon removal projects. The coalition is an advance market commitment (AMC) launched in 2024 by Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Salesforce.
The group has pledged to contract up to 20 million tonnes of carbon removal credits by 2030. This commitment aims to create strong market demand and support the growth of high-impact, science-based restoration projects that can help advance global climate goals.
The agreements they have give developers a steady demand. They also help unlock financing and allow projects to scale.
Symbiosis selected the Appalachian project after a strict review process. It looked at data, field conditions, and long-term risks. The group follows key standards such as durability, transparency, ecological integrity, and community impact. This helps ensure that every credit represents real and measurable carbon removal.
Julia Strong, Executive Director of the Symbiosis Coalition, remarked:
“Our support of Living Carbon reflects our belief that effective nature-based carbon removal requires both strong science and solid execution. Their project stands out for its rigor and for its thoughtful and scalable approach shaped around the needs of local communities, ecosystems, and economies in Appalachia.”
Why Appalachia Matters: From Coal Hubs to Carbon Heroes
The Appalachia region, in the eastern United States, was once a center of coal mining. Today, many of these lands remain unused and degraded. Living Carbon is working to restore them by planting native hardwood and pine trees on former mine sites and damaged farmland.
The project uses a mix of careful site preparation, invasive species control, and strategic planting. This helps trees grow in areas where nature cannot easily recover on its own. The goal is not just to plant trees, but to rebuild entire ecosystems and support long-term carbon storage.
The benefits go beyond carbon removal. Restoring forests improves soil health, water quality, and biodiversity. Native trees help rebuild habitats for local plants and wildlife. These changes can also reduce erosion and improve land stability over time.
The project also creates real economic value. Landowners earn lease payments from land that was once unproductive. Local workers are hired for planting and land restoration.
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In some cases, old mining equipment is reused to support ecological recovery. This helps turn former industrial sites into productive carbon sinks.
Community engagement is a key part of the project. Living Carbon works closely with landowners, local groups, and government agencies. This helps build long-term support and ensures the project fits local needs. Strong local partnerships also improve the chances that the forests will be maintained over time.
The project stands out for its strong science and clear execution plan. It uses careful monitoring and conservative estimates to ensure carbon removal is real. It also applies new methods for tracking results, including advanced baselines and lifecycle analysis.
This type of approach shows that high-quality nature-based carbon removal can deliver more than climate impact. It can restore ecosystems, support local economies, and scale across similar regions. In places like Appalachia, it offers a way to turn damaged land into a long-term climate solution.
Big Business Bets on Carbon Credits
More corporations are now buying carbon removal credits to meet climate goals. For example, Microsoft bought 45 million tonnes of carbon removal in fiscal year 2025. This is nearly double the amount from 2024 and nine times what they bought in 2023.
These purchases are part of a broader climate strategy. Companies are combining emissions reductions with long-term removal commitments. Durable carbon removal credits, which permanently store CO₂, are becoming more important. Businesses feel pressure to deal with emissions that they cannot completely eliminate.
A major supporter of these deals is Frontier, launched in 2022 by Stripe, Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Meta, Shopify, and McKinsey Sustainability. Frontier wants to boost early demand and funding for promising carbon removal technologies.
The company does this through long-term purchase agreements. Its initial goal was $1 billion in purchases by 2030, sending a strong signal to the market about future demand.
By 2025, Frontier signed contracts for various technologies. These include bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), direct air capture (DAC), and enhanced weathering. Several contracts are worth tens of millions of dollars. These agreements help developers survive the early “valley of death,” when financing is hardest to secure.
Market Trends: From Niche to Necessity
The carbon removal market is still small compared with global climate goals, but it is evolving quickly. Industry forecasts say that demand for durable carbon removal credits might hit 100 million tonnes of CO₂ each year by 2030.
This growth is fueled by corporate commitments and government purchases. This is roughly double the supply currently announced, showing a large gap between demand and delivery.
Globally, carbon removal is still a tiny fraction of what is needed. Scientific assessments show that to meet the Paris Agreement, carbon removal needs to increase. By 2050, it should reach 7–9 billion tonnes of CO₂ each year. This is about 4,000 times more than what we do now.
Market projections show strong growth in the next decade. A report by Oliver Wyman and the UK Carbon Markets Forum estimates that the global carbon removal market could grow from $2.7 billion in 2023 to $100 billion per year by 2030–2035, provided policies and standards evolve to support it.
Local and Global Wins
The Appalachia project highlights how carbon removal can benefit both the climate and communities. Restoring degraded lands improves water filtration, soil health, and wildlife habitats. Communities also gain jobs and income through forest management.
Nature-based projects, including reforestation and forest management, currently dominate removal activity. However, they do not offer the same permanence as engineered removals like BECCS or DAC, which store carbon for centuries or longer. Still, both approaches are necessary to scale the carbon removal market.
From Milestones to Market Momentum
The Google, Meta, and McKinsey deal is a milestone for corporate climate action. Long-term agreements help projects secure funding and expand. They also send strong signals to developers and investors. These deals can shift the market from short-term offsets to long-term, permanent carbon removal solutions.
The industry must grow significantly to meet global climate targets. Expanding beyond early adopter companies is essential. Continued policy support, strong standards, and wider sector participation will help scale removals.
In the next decade, how fast carbon removal technologies grow and the amount of credits produced will be key to achieving net-zero goals. Deals like the Appalachia reforestation project are early steps in building a foundational, long-term carbon removal industry.
The post Google, Meta and McKinsey Lead Carbon Removal Boom and Turn Appalachia Green appeared first on Carbon Credits.
What auditors actually test, where projects actually fail, and the contract clauses that protect you before signature.
The meeting happens about fourteen months after the contract was signed. Your assurance provider has reached the nature-based investment line in your Scope 3 file, and the partner across the table has exactly two questions. How do you know the reductions happened? And how do you know they would not have happened anyway?
The first question is MRV: measurement, reporting, and verification. The second is additionality. Between them, they decide whether your nature-based investment counts, in your inventory, in your disclosure, and in front of your board. Everything else in the project documentation is supporting material for these two answers.
This article walks through what each question actually tests, where projects most commonly fail, what digital MRV has changed (and what it has not), and the contract clauses that protect you. The goal is to give you the diligence framework before you sign, because after the credit issues is the wrong time to discover the answers were weak.
What MRV actually verifies
MRV is the machinery that turns a field intervention into a defensible number. Measurement covers the data: biomass surveys, soil sampling, remote sensing, activity records from participating farms. Reporting covers the translation of that data into claimed reductions under a recognised methodology. Verification covers the independent check: an accredited third party tests the reporting against the methodology and the evidence.
The methodologies live in registries. Verra’s Verified Carbon Standard and the Gold Standard are the two largest for nature-based projects, and each publishes the methodology documents, monitoring requirements, and verification protocols that a project must follow. The ICVCM Assessment Framework now sits above the registries, assessing whole methodologies against the Core Carbon Principles and granting the CCP label to those that pass.
For a buyer, the practical questions are concrete. What is the monitoring frequency, and is it specified in the project design document or left vague? Who is the verifier, how were they selected, and how often do they rotate? What raw data do you, the buyer, get access to, and in what format? A project that answers these in writing is a different procurement than one that answers them in a sales call.
What additionality actually proves
Additionality asks whether the intervention caused the reduction, or whether the reduction would have happened anyway. The test is a counterfactual: what would this landscape, this farm, this forest have done without the project’s money?
Three forms matter in practice. Financial additionality asks whether the project needed the carbon revenue to proceed. Regulatory additionality asks whether the activity was already required by law. Common-practice additionality asks whether the activity is already standard in the region, in which case paying for it buys you nothing the world was not getting for free.
The reason additionality dominates audit conversations is recent history. Research published in 2023, including the Science paper examined at length in our piece on conventional offsets and boardroom credibility, found that a large share of REDD+ credits failed the counterfactual test because baselines were inflated. The market response was a wave of methodology revisions at Verra and the arrival of independent ratings agencies whose entire business is re-testing additionality claims. The Carbon Credit Quality Initiative publishes transparent scoring of methodologies on exactly this dimension, and it is free to consult before you sign anything.
Where projects most commonly fail the test
Five failure modes account for most of the wreckage.
- Inflated baselines. The counterfactual assumes more deforestation, more degradation, or lower yields than the evidence supports. The claimed reduction is the gap between reality and the baseline, so an inflated baseline manufactures reductions from nothing.
- Unaccounted leakage. The project protects one forest and the logging moves to the next valley. The methodology is supposed to net this out; weak projects estimate it optimistically.
- Thin permanence protection. Nature-based carbon can reverse: fire, pest, drought, or a change of landowner. Buffer pools and insurance mechanisms exist for this, but their adequacy varies enormously between projects.
- Attribution and double counting. In supply chain settings, the same reduction can be claimed by the supplier, the buyer, and a credit purchaser unless contracts prevent it. Our Insetting vs Offsetting piece covers the inventory rules; the point here is that the auditor will ask who else is counting this tonne.
- Stale monitoring. Data collected at validation and never refreshed. The IPCC AR6 Working Group III land-sector chapter documents how quickly carbon stocks respond to disturbance; a three-year-old measurement is a historical artifact, not a current claim.
What digital MRV changes, and what it does not
Digital MRV is the genuine improvement in the field. Satellite remote sensing, including the free archives at NASA Earthdata, allows biomass and land-cover change to be monitored continuously rather than at multi-year verification intervals. Soil carbon models calibrated with physical sampling reduce the cost of agricultural measurement. The practical effect is more frequent data at lower cost, which compresses the window in which a problem can hide.
What digital MRV does not change is judgment. Baselines are still human decisions about counterfactuals. Additionality is still an argument, not a measurement. Research groups such as the Oxford Smith School have been clear on this point: better sensors improve the M in MRV, but the integrity questions live in the assumptions, and assumptions need governance, not gadgets.
For a buyer, the test is simple. Ask the provider what is measured by instrument, what is estimated by model, and what is assumed by methodology. A provider who can answer that question crisply understands their own evidence chain. A provider who cannot is selling you their confidence rather than their data.
What to require in your contract
The diligence above converts into five contract clauses.
- Monitoring cadence and buyer data access, specified by dataset and frequency.
- Verifier independence, named accreditation, and rotation terms.
- Baseline revision triggers, so the counterfactual updates when the methodology or the evidence changes.
- Reversal liability and buffer adequacy, with the mechanism named and sized.
- Documentation handover in audit-ready form, so the evidence file your assurance provider needs already exists.
None of these clauses is exotic. All of them are absent from weak contracts, and their absence is the most reliable early signal that the MRV and additionality answers will be weak too.
If you are evaluating a nature-based investment and want the MRV and additionality stress-tested before signature rather than after, the carbon and sustainability experts at Carbon Credit Capital can run that review against any project on your shortlist, and design nature-based supply chain investments where the evidence chain is built audit-first. Schedule a consultation.
Sources and further reading
- ICVCM: Core Carbon Principles Assessment Framework
- Verra: Verified Carbon Standard
- Gold Standard for the Global Goals
- Carbon Credit Quality Initiative: Methodology quality scores
- University of Oxford Smith School: Sustainable finance research
- IPCC AR6 Working Group III, Chapter 7: AFOLU
- NASA Earthdata satellite remote sensing archive
EU Directive: Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition (ECGT)
The EU Directive, Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition (ECGT), takes effect on September 27, 2026.(1) The goal of ECGT is to protect consumers by ensuring that environmental claims are fair, understandable, and reliable. This regulation does create a new compliance requirement for businesses, but it also provides sustainability and marketing teams with important guidance that helps create consistency in sustainability communications.
Key takeaways
- ECGT takes effect September 27, 2026, and prohibits claims that a product or service has a neutral, reduced, or positive environmental impact based on offsetting alone.
- Named example phrases the regulation prohibits include climate neutral, CO2 neutral certified, carbon positive, climate net zero, climate compensated, reduced climate impact, and limited CO2 footprint.
- ECGT does not want to deter investment in carbon credits. It wants companies to communicate the real benefits of the projects they support instead.
- SBTi’s guidance recommends framing carbon credits as taking responsibility for ongoing emissions, not as making a product or company neutral.
- Voluntary carbon projects deliver real climate progress: reducing super-pollutants, protecting and restoring ecosystems, and supporting communities.
Regarding carbon credits specifically, voluntary carbon projects deliver important climate progress and environmental benefits that provide many talking points for companies. They reduce climate super-pollutants by removing industrial emissions like methane, N2O, HFCs and others. They protect and restore valuable ecosystems and carbon sinks like forests, mangroves and grasslands. They help communities by reducing local pollution, creating employment opportunities, improving access to healthcare, and more.
The Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi), a global leader in business climate action, concludes that alongside aggressive decarbonization, we should also use high quality carbon credits to take responsibility for our ongoing emissions. SBTi recognizes that carbon credits are important “to help limit temperature overshoot, mitigate transition risks, and support climate solutions.”(2)
ECGT language on carbon offsetting says that they do not want to deter investment in carbon credits. They just want companies to focus on communicating the benefits of the projects they support and avoid claims beyond the scope of carbon credits, which is good for everyone, companies and consumers alike.
The regulation reinforces that carbon credits do not change the sustainability of your products, so carbon credit buyers should not suggest that their products are more sustainable because of carbon credits. Instead, companies need to promote their climate contributions as a way to compensate or take responsibility for their carbon emissions by supporting projects that do great things like reducing global carbon emissions, reducing pollution, preventing deforestation, restoring forests, and more.
ECGT language related to carbon offsetting
The regulation is particularly focused on prohibiting claims, based on offsetting greenhouse gas emissions, that a product or service has a neutral, reduced, or positive impact on the environment in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. These claims are prohibited in all circumstances because they mislead consumers into believing the claim relates to the product itself, or to how it was made and supplied, or into thinking that using the product carries no environmental impact at all.
Named examples of prohibited claims include:
- climate neutral
- CO2 neutral certified
- carbon positive
- climate net zero
- climate compensated
- reduced climate impact
- limited CO2 footprint
These claims are only allowed when they rest on a product’s actual lifecycle impact, not on offsetting emissions outside that product’s value chain, since the two are not equivalent. This prohibition does not stop companies from advertising their investments in environmental initiatives, including carbon credit projects, as long as they present that information in a way that is not misleading and that meets the other requirements of Union law.(1)
SBTi also provides guidance on climate contribution language in its Corporate Net Zero Standard Version 2.0 Draft for Second Public Consultation, November 2025. While the SBTi language is fairly technical, it has a good framework for crafting a climate contribution message.
SBTi Language for Carbon Credits(3)
- Take responsibility for ongoing emissions by delivering mitigation impact contributions
- Carbon credits certify the mitigation outcomes of projects that reduce, avoid, or remove carbon emissions
- Activities that reduce emissions from emission sources not located within the company’s value chain
- Activities that conserve, protect, and enhance natural carbon sinks
- Activities that capture and store carbon in storage pools
SBTi’s draft standard also walks through sample claim language for this kind of contribution. In general, the samples move from a simple percentage statement, to naming a specific verified tonnage tied to that percentage, to a fuller statement that breaks the tonnage into reductions versus removals. Across all three, the framing stays consistent: a company took responsibility for a defined share of its ongoing emissions over a set period, by funding a specific, verified amount of mitigation, achieved through emission reductions or removals.(3)
FAQ: ECGT and Carbon Credit Claims
When does the ECGT directive take effect?
The rules apply across the EU from September 27, 2026, after member states transposed the directive into national law by March 27, 2026.
Does ECGT ban carbon offsetting?
No. It bans specific marketing claims that a product or service is environmentally neutral, reduced impact, or positive based on offsetting. Advertising investment in carbon credit projects themselves is still allowed if it is not misleading.
What phrases does ECGT specifically prohibit?
Named examples include climate neutral, CO2 neutral certified, carbon positive, climate net zero, climate compensated, reduced climate impact, and limited CO2 footprint, when those claims are based on offsetting rather than a product’s actual lifecycle impact.
How should a company describe its carbon credit purchases instead?
SBTi’s guidance recommends stating the specific verified tonnage of emissions reductions or removals funded and describing that as taking responsibility for a defined share of ongoing emissions, rather than claiming the company or product is neutral.
Does this rule apply to company level sustainability claims too?
ECGT is focused on claims about specific products and services in consumer marketing. Broader company level sustainability communication is a separate matter still governed by other existing rules.
While ECGT does add a new compliance burden for businesses, it helps create consistency in sustainability messaging that is important to building confidence in voluntary carbon projects and scaling the industry to help us achieve progress on global carbon emissions.
Disclaimer: Terrapass does not provide legal or regulatory advice. Any interpretation of regulation must be approved by your legal representative.
References:
(1) https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2024/825/oj
(2) https://files.sciencebasedtargets.org/production/files/Corporate-Net-Zero-Standard-version-2.pdf
(3) https://files.sciencebasedtargets.org/production/files/CNZS-V2-Second-Consultation-Draft.pdf
The post The EU’s New Green Claims Rules and Carbon Credits appeared first on Terrapass.
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