Published

9 months ago

October 23, 2025

Alice Rush

Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) has taken another major step toward its 2030 carbon-negative goal by expanding its partnership with carbon removal company UNDO. The tech giant has agreed to purchase 28,900 tonnes of permanent CO₂ removals, backed by an innovative financing structure from Inlandsis, a Canadian climate fund managed by Fondaction Asset Management.

The deal—estimated to be worth over $5 million based on current Enhanced Rock Weathering (ERW) credit prices—marks Microsoft’s third and largest purchase from UNDO to date.

It follows earlier commitments in 2023 and 2024, bringing the company’s total removals with UNDO to nearly 49,000 tonnes.

carbon removal ERW — Data Source: Allied Offsets Q1 2025 Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) Market Update

Financing the Next Frontier of Carbon Removal

To keep global warming below 1.5°C, the world must remove billions of tonnes of CO₂ from the atmosphere by mid-century. But achieving that scale requires more than promising technology. It demands financing structures that can fund large-scale deployment and reward verified results.

That’s where Inlandsis plays a crucial role. The fund has developed a first-of-its-kind debt financing model to fully support UNDO’s latest ERW project. The structure ensures that capital is deployed in sync with verified progress, effectively tying funding to real-world delivery.

UNDO’s CEO Jim Mann described the model as a turning point for the industry:

“Innovative financing is the catalyst for unlocking gigatonne-scale carbon removal. The support of Inlandsis shows how financial backers can help transform carbon removal into a genuine asset class, one that is scalable, tradable, and investable. By combining financial innovation, strategic partnerships and bleeding-edge science, UNDO is accelerating deployment and delivering both climate and agricultural benefits in Ontario and beyond.”

By blending financial innovation, strategic partnerships, and rigorous science, UNDO is proving that enhanced rock weathering can be both a credible carbon removal method and an investable business model.

Additionally, the company’s focus on transparent MRV (measurement, reporting, and verification) ensures that every credit sold is backed by evidence and durability.

Microsoft’s Evidence-Backed Commitment

Microsoft’s partnership with UNDO has evolved gradually but strategically—each stage built on verified outcomes and increasing scientific confidence.

2023: Microsoft made its first-ever ERW purchase with a 5,000-tonne agreement.
2024: The company followed up with 15,000 tonnes and additional funding to strengthen scientific measurement and monitoring.
2025: This latest deal for 28,900 tonnes represents the company’s largest ERW investment yet.

The steady growth signals Microsoft’s confidence in the integrity and scalability of enhanced rock weathering. It also reflects a shift in the carbon removal market, where buyers are moving from pilot projects to multi-year, performance-based partnerships.

Phillip Goodman, Director of Microsoft’s Carbon Removal Portfolio, underscored the importance of science-led delivery,

“Enhanced rock weathering is a promising pathway to gigatonne-scale carbon removal. UNDO’s commitment to scientific rigour gives us confidence in both the durability of these credits and their role in helping Microsoft achieve its goal of being carbon negative by 2030.”

For Microsoft, this approach ensures that every tonne purchased represents verified, durable removal—not speculative offsets. The company’s portfolio strategy emphasizes transparency, permanence, and continuous improvement.

READ MORE:

Backing UNDO: Insurance-Enabled, Bankable Carbon Solutions

For Inlandsis, the UNDO deal marks two significant milestones: it is the fund’s first ERW investment and its first Canadian project under its second climate fund. These achievements underscore how carbon finance is evolving—shifting from traditional offset models to evidence-backed removal financing.

David Moffat, Managing Director at Inlandsis, said the project highlights a new direction for climate investment:

“This strategic and innovative deal strengthens the growing relationship between Microsoft and UNDO while advancing the critical fight against climate change. It also reflects our commitment to financing credible, scalable carbon solutions in Canada and beyond.”

Adding another layer of security, the deal is underwritten by CFC, a specialized insurance provider for the carbon markets. CFC’s involvement de-risks the transaction by ensuring compensation if project milestones aren’t met—an emerging best practice in carbon finance.

Such insurance-backed financing is becoming a cornerstone for scaling carbon removal. It gives both investors and lenders the confidence to fund long-term projects, accelerating deployment and making climate solutions bankable.

A Replicable Model for the Carbon Market

This financing structure is designed to meet the needs of all players in the carbon ecosystem:

Buyers like Microsoft get verified, durable credits with transparent evidence.
Lenders gain confidence through milestone-based repayment tied to credit issuance.
Farmers benefit from predictable, low-disruption operations that align with agricultural cycles.

By ensuring that capital flows only after verified results, the model turns projected tonnes into measured, issued removals. It’s a practical, transparent framework that can be replicated across regions and scales.

UNDO’s growing list of partners—Microsoft, Barclays, British Airways, and McLaren—illustrates strong corporate demand for high-integrity removals. Each new deal builds capacity for UNDO’s operations, allowing it to scale faster while maintaining scientific rigor.

Ground-Level Action: Every Rock, Every Acre, Every Record

Under the new agreement, UNDO will deploy 90,000 tonnes of crushed wollastonite, a calcium silicate rock, across 30,000 acres of Canadian farmland. The operation is designed to fit seamlessly within normal farming practices, using existing machinery and scheduled around planting and harvest.

The delivery process is transparent and data-rich:

Equipment is calibrated and GPS-tracked.
Every load of rock is logged and verified.
Soil and porewater samples are collected at multiple intervals and analyzed in accredited labs.
Each sample follows a strict chain of custody from field to lab to final data report.

These steps ensure that every credit issued represents real, measured carbon removal. UNDO’s system links field operations with verified outcomes, providing partners with full traceability from quarry to credit.

UNDO’s ERW process

Science-Led, Evidence-Based Removals

Enhanced rock weathering accelerates a natural process where CO₂ reacts with silicate minerals in rock, forming stable carbonates that lock away carbon for thousands of years.

UNDO’s science-first approach ensures that every aspect—from sampling design to lab analysis—is statistically sound and auditable. Sampling plans are written in advance for accuracy, include control plots, and specify precise locations and timing for collection.

Once samples are analyzed, results go through multiple quality control checks, and data are tied to GPS coordinates and timestamps. Life-cycle emissions from quarrying, transportation, and spreading are subtracted, and uncertainty margins are conservatively applied before credits are issued.

Issuance happens only after independent verification, meaning each credit represents net carbon removed, not just projected outcomes. This evidence-led methodology helps ensure transparency and credibility, both essential for scaling trust in the carbon market.

A Blueprint for Scalable Carbon Removal

This partnership between Microsoft, UNDO, and Inlandsis represents a powerful new model for how the carbon removal sector can grow. It combines long-term purchasing commitments, performance-linked finance, scientific validation, and insurance-backed assurance into one scalable framework.

The collaboration also offers a clear path for other companies and investors: pair proven carbon removal science with structured, delivery-based finance to accelerate real climate impact.

As UNDO expands operations, its combination of practical field deployment, scientific transparency, and financial accountability will serve as a blueprint for scaling carbon removal across geographies.

The next phase is focused on steady execution—planning rock supply, coordinating farm deployments, and sharing verified progress through public reporting. Each season adds data, strengthens methodologies, and builds confidence in the durability of ERW as a global climate tool.

The Surge in Verified Removals Signals Market Maturity

Microsoft’s (MSFT stock) $5 million partnership with UNDO is a signal of market maturity. It shows how science-based removal, innovative finance, and transparent delivery can work together to build a credible, investable carbon market.

Allied Offsets data showed that in the first quarter of 2025, around 780,000 CDR credits were contracted — a surge of 122% compared to the same period in 2024.

Additionally, 16 million credits were sold in the first six months of 2025 – marking it the strongest start to a year so far. The momentum is fueled by major buyers like Microsoft, aiming to be carbon negative by 2030. Also rise in biomass-based removal methods that are reshaping corporate offset strategies is contributing to the growth.

Market Highlights

carbon removal Microsoft — Source: Allied offsets

As the world races to reach net zero, this deal stands out as a real-world example of progress: a partnership that delivers measured, permanent carbon removal, financed and verified with integrity.

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The post Microsoft (MSFT) Buys 28,900 Tonnes of CO₂ Removal from UNDO in Landmark Multi-Million-Dollar Deal appeared first on Carbon Credits.

Carbon Footprint

How to improve Scope 3 data accuracy for CSRD

Published

1 day ago

July 17, 2026

Alice Rush

For most businesses, the emissions that matter most sit outside their own walls. Scope 3 emissions, everything generated across your value chain, from the suppliers who make your inputs to the customers who use your products, typically make up the majority of a company’s total carbon footprint. Under the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), those value-chain emissions now have to be measured and disclosed with a rigour that spend-based estimates alone struggle to satisfy. This guide sets out how to improve Scope 3 data accuracy for CSRD: the calculation methods open to you, how to move from estimates to verified supplier data, and how to govern that data so it holds up to audit.

Carbon Footprint

How community stewardship makes carbon credits durable

Published

1 day ago

July 17, 2026

Alice Rush

A carbon credit is a commitment that extends well into the future. The tonne of CO₂ compensated for today from a nature-based carbon project must remain out of the atmosphere for good, which means the forest behind the credit has to remain standing long after the transaction is complete. For any buyer, this raises a defining question: What ensures that the forest endures?

Carbon Footprint

Why Conventional Carbon Offsets Are Losing Boardroom Credibility

Published

3 days ago

July 15, 2026

Alice Rush

What replaced the cheap REDD credit on the boardroom slide deck, and why procurement is leading the rewrite.

Three years ago, a corporate slide showing a portfolio of cheap REDD+ credits could carry a board meeting. The number was big, the price was low, and the press release wrote itself. Today, that same slide gets sent back with questions. The questions are uncomfortable, the answers are unclear, and your general counsel is suddenly in the room.

Conventional carbon offsets are not dead. The voluntary carbon market retired 202 million tonnes in 2025, and the Morgan Stanley Institute for Sustainable Investing survey published in January 2026 confirmed that interest from corporate buyers remains substantial. What changed is the credibility threshold. The integrity floor has risen, the disclosure scrutiny has tightened, and the buyer profile has shifted. This article tracks what changed, what sophisticated buyers now ask before signing, and what serious corporates are putting on the board slide instead.

What boards used to buy, and why it stopped working

The 2020 to 2022 model was simple: buy a large tranche of avoidance credits at low single-digit prices, retire them against the company footprint, announce the carbon-neutral claim, and move on. Most of those credits came from REDD+ projects, renewable energy installations in countries where the renewable energy was already economic, or methane projects with thin documentation.

Several things broke that model. Academic research published in 2023, including a widely cited Science paper, found that the majority of REDD+ credits issued under the most common methodologies did not represent additional reductions when tested against rigorous counterfactuals. The Voluntary Carbon Markets Integrity Initiative published its Claims Code of Practice, which sets requirements for what companies can credibly claim from credit use. The European Union finalised its Green Claims Directive, restricting how companies can describe products as climate-neutral. France’s Décret 2022-539 already restricts carbon neutrality advertising. California’s AB 1305 imposes disclosure requirements on any company making net-zero or carbon-neutral claims while doing business in the state.

The collective effect: the cheap credit no longer buys the announcement, and the announcement now carries litigation risk.

The integrity reset: ICVCM, VCMI, and what changed

The Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market published the Core Carbon Principles in 2023 and began assessing methodologies against them in 2024. The first methodologies received the CCP label later that year. The point of the label is to give corporate buyers a defensible quality screen they can cite in disclosure.

The Voluntary Carbon Markets Integrity Initiative complements this on the demand side. Its Claims Code of Practice defines what a buyer can say (Silver, Gold, or Platinum claims, with associated requirements) based on the quality of credits used and the underlying decarbonisation strategy. Together, CCP and VCMI build a quality stack: CCP on the supply, VCMI on the claim, with the science-based target sitting underneath both.

The reset is not a ban on offsets. It is a ratchet. Credits that meet the new bar continue to clear; credits that do not, do not. The Morgan Stanley survey found that 61% of current buyers like the CCP label concept but that supply of labelled credits remains limited. That supply constraint is now visible in pricing.

What sophisticated buyers ask before they sign

The questions on the procurement scorecard have changed. A 2022 buyer might have asked about price, vintage, and project type. A 2026 buyer asks five different questions before any of those.

What does the counterfactual look like, and who validated it.
What is the permanence regime, and what is the buffer pool exposure.
What is the leakage risk, and how is it mitigated.
What rating has the project received from the independent ratings agencies (Sylvera, BeZero, Calyx Global), and what was the rationale.
What is the documentation discipline that survives an audit four years from now when the procurement team that signed the contract has moved on.

If the vendor cannot answer those five questions on a first call, the conversation ends. Conversely, if the vendor can answer them with documented specificity, the conversation often expands beyond a single transaction toward a multi-year engagement.

Where this leaves your near-term commitments

You probably have near-term commitments that pre-date the integrity reset. Public targets to be carbon neutral by 2025 or 2030. Product-level claims that ran in last year’s marketing. Disclosed reduction trajectories that assumed continued access to cheap credits.

You have three workable paths. The first is to re-baseline your strategy, replacing the most exposed credits with higher-quality alternatives and adjusting the public language to match what you can defend. The second is to shift the underlying spend from offsetting outside your value chain to investing inside your value chain, where reductions count against Scope 3 directly and the audit trail is cleaner. The third is to keep the strategy and absorb the risk, which is increasingly the most expensive option once you price in litigation, restatement, and reputational exposure.

Most serious buyers are choosing the second path. It moves the carbon spend from a compliance cost to a procurement and resilience investment, and it removes the central failure point of the legacy model: the disconnect between where the emissions occurred and where the reductions sat. Nature-based supply chain investments, structured under the GHG Protocol Land Sector and Removals Standard and aligned to the SBTi FLAG Guidance, are the asset class that fits this brief. They generate inventory-grade reductions, they produce audit-grade documentation, and they survive the new claim restrictions because the carbon math sits inside the value chain that the disclosure already covers.

If you are reassessing a carbon strategy under the new integrity bar, or rebuilding a board narrative that has to survive a more skeptical audience, the carbon and sustainability experts at Carbon Credit Capital can help. The Dual-Value Model gives you a defensible alternative to legacy offset purchases, with the documentation and operational integration that survives the procurement scorecard and the audit. Schedule a consultation.