Mastercard says it has exceeded its 2025 emissions reduction targets while continuing to grow its global business. The company reduced emissions across its operations even as revenue increased strongly in 2025.
The update comes from Mastercard’s official sustainability and technology disclosure published in 2026. It confirms progress toward its long-term goal of net-zero emissions by 2040, covering its full value chain.
The results are important for the financial technology sector. Digital payments depend heavily on data centers and cloud systems, which are energy-intensive and linked to rising global emissions.
Breaking the Pattern: Emissions Fall While Revenue Rises
In 2025, Mastercard surpassed its interim climate targets compared with a 2016 baseline. The company reported a 44% reduction in Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions, beating its target of 38%. It also achieved a 46% reduction in Scope 3 emissions, far exceeding its 20% target.
At the same time, Mastercard recorded 16% revenue growth in 2025. This shows that emissions reductions continued even as the business expanded. Mastercard Chief Sustainability Officer Ellen Jackowski and Senior Vice President of Data and Governance Adam Tenzer wrote:
“These results reflect a comprehensive approach built on renewable energy investment and procurement, supply chain engagement, and embedding environmental sustainability into everyday business decisions.”
The company also reported a 1% year-on-year decline in total emissions, marking the third consecutive year of emissions reduction. This is important because digital payment networks usually grow with higher computing demand.
Mastercard says this trend reflects improved efficiency across its operations, better infrastructure use, and increased reliance on cleaner energy sources.
The Hidden Footprint: Why Data Centers Drive Mastercard’s Emissions
A large share of Mastercard’s emissions comes from its digital infrastructure. According to the company’s sustainability report, data centers account for about 60% of Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions. Technology-related goods and services make up roughly one-third of Scope 3 emissions.
This reflects how modern financial systems operate. Digital payments, fraud detection, and AI-based analytics require a large-scale computing infrastructure.
Global data centers already consume about 415–460 TWh of electricity per year, equal to roughly 1.5%–2% of global electricity demand. This number is expected to rise as AI usage expands.
Mastercard’s challenge is similar to that of other digital companies. Higher transaction volume usually leads to greater computing needs. This can raise emissions unless we improve efficiency.
To manage this, the company is focusing on renewable energy procurement, hardware consolidation, and more efficient software systems.
Carbon-Aware Technology Becomes Core to Operations
Mastercard is integrating sustainability directly into its technology systems rather than treating it as a separate reporting function. Since 2023, the company has developed a patent-pending system that assigns a Sustainability Score to its technology infrastructure. This system measures environmental impact in real time.
It tracks factors such as:
- Energy use in kilowatt-hours,
- Regional carbon intensity of electricity,
- Server utilization rates,
- Hardware lifecycle efficiency, and
- Data processing location.
This allows engineers to design systems with lower carbon impact.
The company also uses carbon-aware software design. This means computing workloads can be adjusted to reduce energy use when carbon intensity is high in certain regions.
This approach reflects a wider trend in the technology and financial sectors. More companies are now including carbon tracking in their main infrastructure choices. They no longer see it just as a reporting task.
Powering Payments: Mastercard’s Net-Zero Playbook
Mastercard has committed to reaching net-zero emissions by 2040, covering Scope 1, Scope 2, and Scope 3 emissions across its value chain. The target is aligned with science-based climate pathways and includes operations, suppliers, and technology infrastructure.
To achieve this, the company is focusing on four main areas.
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Increasing renewable energy use in operations
Mastercard already powers its global operations with 100% renewable electricity. This covers offices and data centers in multiple regions.
The company has also achieved a 46% reduction in total Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions compared to its 2016 baseline. It continues to use renewable energy purchasing to maintain this progress.
In 2024, Mastercard procured over 112,000 MWh of renewable electricity, supporting lower emissions from its global operations.
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Improving energy efficiency in data centers
Data centers account for about 60% of Mastercard’s Scope 1 and 2 emissions. To reduce this, Mastercard is upgrading servers, cutting unused computing capacity, and improving workload efficiency. It also uses real-time monitoring to reduce energy waste.
These improvements helped keep operational emissions stable in 2024, even as computing demand increased. Efficiency gains combined with renewable energy use supported this outcome.
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Working with suppliers to reduce emissions
Around 75%–76% of Mastercard’s total emissions come from its value chain. This includes cloud providers, technology partners, and hardware suppliers.
To address this, Mastercard works with suppliers to set emissions targets and improve reporting. More than 70% of its suppliers now have their own climate reduction goals.
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Upgrading and consolidating hardware systems
Mastercard is reducing emissions by improving its hardware systems. It decommissions unused servers, consolidates infrastructure, and shifts to more efficient cloud platforms.
Technology goods and services account for about one-third of Scope 3 emissions. By reducing unnecessary hardware and extending equipment life, Mastercard lowers both energy use and manufacturing-related emissions while maintaining system performance.
Renewable energy procurement is central to its strategy. It’s crucial for powering data centers, as they account for most of their operational emissions.
Mastercard works with suppliers because a large part of emissions comes from the value chain. This includes technology manufacturing and cloud services. By 2025, the company exceeded several short-term climate goals. This shows early progress on its long-term net-zero path.
ESG Pressure Hits Fintech: The New Rules of Digital Finance
Mastercard’s results come during a period of rising ESG pressure across the financial sector. Banks, payment networks, and fintech companies must now disclose emissions. This is especially true for Scope 3 emissions, which cover supply chain and digital infrastructure impacts.
Several global trends are shaping the industry:
- Growing regulatory focus on climate disclosure,
- Rising investor demand for ESG transparency,
- Expansion of digital payments and cloud computing, and
- Increased energy use from AI and data processing.
Data centers are becoming a major focus area because they link financial services to energy consumption. In Mastercard’s case, they are the largest source of operational emissions.
At the same time, financial institutions are expected to align with net-zero targets between 2040 and 2050. This depends on regional regulations and climate frameworks. Mastercard’s early progress places it ahead of many peers in meeting short-term emissions goals.
Decoupling Growth From Emissions
One of the most important signals from Mastercard’s 2025 results is the separation of business growth from emissions.
The company achieved 16% revenue growth while reducing total emissions by 1% year-on-year. This marks a continued pattern of emissions decline alongside business expansion.
Mastercard attributes this to improved system efficiency, renewable energy use, and better infrastructure management. In simple terms, the company is processing more transactions without a matching rise in emissions.
This trend is important because digital payment systems normally scale with computing demand. Without efficiency gains, emissions would typically rise with business growth.
Looking ahead, demand will continue to grow. Global payments revenue is projected to reach around $3.1 trillion by 2028, according to McKinsey & Company, growing at close to 10% annually.
Global data center electricity demand might double by 2030. This rise is mainly due to AI workloads, says the International Energy Agency. Mastercard’s results show that tech upgrades can lower the carbon impact of digital finance. This is true even as global usage rises.
The Takeaway: Fintech’s Proof That Growth and Emissions Can Split
Mastercard’s 2025 sustainability performance shows measurable progress toward its net-zero goal. At the same time, major challenges remain. Data centers continue to be the largest emissions source, and global digital activity is still expanding rapidly due to AI and cloud computing.
Mastercard’s approach shows how financial technology companies are adapting. Sustainability is no longer a separate goal. It is becoming part of how digital systems are designed and operated.
The next test will be whether these efficiency gains can continue to outpace the rapid growth of global digital payments and AI-driven financial systems.
The post Mastercard Beats 2025 Emissions Targets as Revenue Rises 16%, Breaking the Growth vs Carbon Trade-Off 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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