The voluntary carbon market (VCM) is a crucial tool in the global fight against climate change. It allows companies, governments, and individuals to purchase carbon credits that represent a reduction or removal of greenhouse gases, offsetting their own emissions. Over the past decade, the VCM has grown rapidly, but it is now entering a new, more complex phase.
Forest Trends’ Ecosystem Marketplace State of the Voluntary Carbon Market (SOVCM) 2025 report shows that the market is shifting. It’s moving from cheap credits and volume to higher standards of environmental integrity.
Buyers are demanding credits that offer clear, verifiable climate benefits. This change comes from increased attention from regulators, investors, and civil groups. They want to make sure carbon offsets truly reflect climate progress.
New technologies and methods are also emerging. They improve how entities measure and verify emissions reductions and removals. These shifts are becoming more visible in market data, particularly in how transaction volumes and buyer behavior are evolving.
Falling Transaction Volumes, But Demand Remains Resilient
One of the most striking findings in the SOVCM 2025 report is the sharp drop in the total volume of carbon credits traded on the VCM. In 2024, the transaction volume fell by 25% compared to the previous year, bringing it to the lowest level seen since 2018.
The decline has sparked questions about demand for voluntary offsets. This is important, especially as companies face pressure to meet net-zero targets and cut their carbon footprints. However, a closer look reveals that demand is holding steady — just in a more cautious and deliberate way.
The market is seeing fewer credits traded. However, the number of credits retired for emissions offset has stayed steady. It’s about 182 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (MtCO2e) each year since 2021.
Retirement means the credits are used and are permanently removed from the market. This way, they can’t be resold. It shows that buyers are still dedicated to making real climate impacts.
The drop in trading volumes and steady retirements show that companies are being more careful and strategic in buying carbon credits. They seem to focus more on quality than quantity. They look for projects that fit their sustainability goals and meet stricter standards.
Ricardo Bayon, Partner and Co-founder of Encourage Capital, emphasized this VCM finding, noting:
“The underlying fundamental indicator of demand, the retirements, continue to grow and they have been growing on a pretty constant trend since the market was created. Those companies and individuals who are buying carbon and retiring them are still doing so undeterred; chastened but not deterred. And so the market continues to grow (maybe not as rapidly as its most fervent acolytes would like), and I believe it will once again boom when issues of trust and integrity are dealt with. And they are being dealt with. Buckle up. What goes down, can also go up.”
Carbon credit prices also reflect this cautious optimism. In 2024, the average price for carbon credits dropped slightly by 5.5% to just over $6 per ton of CO2e.
Even though this dip is small, prices are still more than double what they were five years ago. This shows that demand for higher-quality projects is growing. The small price drop may be connected to a wider slowdown in credit supply. It could also relate to market uncertainty from changing regulations.
This steady demand shows a growing market. Buyers now want more than just compliance or publicity. They seek real, lasting environmental benefits. It also underscores the importance of continued market reforms to ensure trust and credibility.
Quality Over Quantity: The Market’s Shift Toward Integrity
As the voluntary carbon market matures, quality has become a central theme. The time of cheap, poorly verified credits is ending. Now, there’s a stronger focus on the environmental quality of carbon offsets.
The report shows that the total value of traded carbon credits in the voluntary market dropped by 29% in 2024. It hit $535 million, down from earlier years. Despite this decline, the market value remains 1.9 times higher than in 2018, due to relatively stable prices.
The fall in value reflects a 25% drop in transaction volume, but not a collapse in demand. Buyers are now more selective. They focus on higher-quality credits, so prices have not dropped sharply. This trend suggests that while liquidity is lower, the underlying market interest in carbon credits—especially those with strong environmental integrity—remains firm.
This focus has led to a rise in the value of “removal” credits—those generated by projects that physically extract carbon from the atmosphere and store it long-term. Examples include reforestation, afforestation, mangrove restoration, and emerging technologies like direct air capture.
In 2024, removal credits sold for an average price 381% higher than regular emission reduction credits. This shows that buyers are ready to pay more for projects that actively take carbon from the air.
The move to removal credits comes from the understanding that just cutting emissions isn’t enough to reach the Paris Agreement goals. Many climate experts say we need negative emissions to keep global warming below 1.5°C. This means removing carbon from the air. In response, voluntary buyers are backing projects that help with long-term carbon storage and improve ecosystem health.
New Rules, New Trust: Standards Take Center Stage
The Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM) has launched Core Carbon Principles (CCPs). These principles aim to spot high-quality credits. These standards are still being put into action. So far, only a few projects have been approved under the CCPs in 2024. However, they are already impacting market demand.
For instance, credits from CCP-approved landfill gas projects tripled in transaction volumes. Prices also rose by 35% in the year’s second half. This shows that market participants are starting to reward credits that meet stricter quality criteria.
Project Types: Winners and Losers
Not all carbon credit projects are seeing the same trends. Forestry and land use credits are growing fast. Improved Forest Management (IFM) credits are a big part of this. In fact, IFM credit trading volumes have risen over 3x. Buyers are focusing on sustainable forest practices.
In contrast, credits from Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) projects have dropped. This decline is partly due to worries about their additionality and permanence.
Renewable energy projects, once a staple of the voluntary carbon market, continue to lose ground. Trading volumes for these credits dropped nearly 25% in 2024.
Biogas and landfill gas projects are gaining popularity in this category. They command higher prices because they provide clear and verifiable emission reductions. Plus, they often bring local environmental benefits.
Agriculture, afforestation, and blue carbon projects create removal credits. Their prices rose by about 20%, showing more buyer interest.
Preference for Recent Vintage Credits
Buyers are showing a strong preference for carbon credits from recent years. Credits with vintages from the last five years sold at a 217% premium compared to older credits, up from a 53% premium in 2023. This indicates that buyers want assurance that offsets are current and reflect recent climate action.
Looking Ahead: Navigating a Market in Transition
The voluntary carbon market is clearly in a period of change—moving from a legacy system toward a more robust, transparent, and high-integrity marketplace. Transaction volumes are down, but steady credit retirements and stable prices show that demand for carbon offsets is strong.
Standards like the ICVCM’s Core Carbon Principles are gaining traction, and buyers now focus more on removals and recent vintages. This shift is setting up the market for long-term growth rooted in quality, not just quantity. This transition may be bumpy, but it is essential for the voluntary carbon market to play a credible role in global climate action.
The post VCM Makeover in 2024: Carbon Credit Trading Drops 25%, Removals Soar 381% appeared first on Carbon Credits.
Most businesses that decide to act on their net-zero targets reach the same point of friction. Buying carbon credits has meant tracking down brokers, sitting through sales calls, and requesting a quote just to learn a price, sometimes with limited proof of what you are buying.
The earnings calls that quietly reframed climate from sustainability question to operating risk.
Three earnings calls in the last 18 months tell the story without any help from a press release.
Hershey, May 2024: cocoa price exposure compresses margin, and the company attributes part of the cost shock to West African weather. Olam, July 2024: coffee climate exposure quantified in the annual report. JBS, January 2025: supply chain climate disclosures expanded materially in response to investor pressure and regulatory expectation. None of these companies issued the announcement as climate news. They issued it as financial news. The climate-linked supply chain risk did not arrive with a sustainability framing; it arrived as a P&L line.
You are probably reading this article because you suspect the same thing is happening to your business. This piece walks through what is showing up on which earnings calls, how procurement and finance leaders are quantifying the exposure, and what serious corporates are doing about it before the regulator asks.
Where climate risk has already appeared in earnings
The pattern is consistent across resource-intensive sectors. A weather event compresses supply, the price spikes, the cost flows through the income statement, and the analyst on the call asks whether the event is anomalous or structural. Increasingly, the honest answer is the second one.
Cocoa is the cleanest example. The 2023 to 2024 West African harvest fell sharply on the back of erratic rainfall and disease. Cocoa futures more than tripled. Companies with concentrated West African sourcing absorbed the cost; companies with diversified sourcing absorbed less. The exposure was not climate as ESG topic. It was climate as cost of goods.
Coffee follows the same pattern. Brazilian and Vietnamese harvests have moved on weather more sharply across the last several seasons. Roasters with long-tenor supplier relationships and origin diversification have managed the volatility; roasters with spot-market exposure have not. Wheat, sugar, palm oil, beef: the same dynamic in different commodities, a pattern the IPCC AR6 Working Group II report projects will intensify across agricultural systems through mid-century.
What this means: climate risk is no longer a footnote in the 10-K. It is a line item the CFO has to explain on the call.
The three commodity exposures that hit margin first
For most companies with material Scope 3 exposure, three exposures dominate the near-term P&L risk.
- Concentrated single-origin sourcing in a climate-vulnerable region. If your tier-one supply for any material commodity sits in one geography, you have a concentration risk that climate amplifies. Diversification across origins is the obvious hedge, but it takes years to build and requires relationships you cannot acquire by tender.
- Supplier financial fragility under climate stress. Smallholder farmers, who supply a large share of the global cocoa, coffee, and palm oil market, do not carry the balance sheets to absorb yield shocks. When yields collapse, they exit. When they exit, your supply base shrinks, and the surviving suppliers raise prices. The risk is structural, not cyclical.
- Logistics and storage exposure to extreme weather. Hurricane disruptions to Gulf shipping, drought-driven Panama Canal restrictions, flooding in European inland waterways: each of these has moved input costs in the last three years, a pattern documented in Munich Re’s natural catastrophe data. The exposure shows up as a one-quarter event in the financial press but accumulates over time on the cost line.
TCFD and ISSB disclosure changes
The disclosure architecture has now caught up with the risk. The Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, whose recommendations are now embedded in the ISSB’s IFRS S2 climate standard, requires companies to disclose climate-related risks across physical and transition categories, with quantification where possible.
For physical risk specifically (the climate-linked supply chain risk you are reading about), the disclosure must address both acute exposures (extreme weather events) and chronic exposures (gradual changes in temperature, precipitation, and growing seasons). The disclosure must address the time horizon over which the risk is material, the parts of the value chain exposed, and the financial impact under different scenarios.
The CSRD imposes similar requirements under European law, with double materiality (both financial and impact materiality) embedded in the assessment. The practical effect: your auditors and your investor relations team now need a defensible answer to the climate-linked supply chain risk question, and the answer needs to be quantified.
What procurement and finance can do now
Three actions matter near-term.
Map your exposure. Most companies do not have a clear view of which tier-one and tier-two suppliers sit in which climate-vulnerable geographies. Without the map, you cannot quantify the risk, and without the quantification, you cannot disclose it credibly. The map is the foundation, and World Resources Institute climate risk research provides useful public tooling to start.
Diversify and deepen, in that order. Diversification across origins reduces concentration risk, but the deeper move is to invest in the resilience of the suppliers you already have. Regenerative practices, agroforestry, soil health interventions: these reduce yield volatility under climate stress and protect your input cost trajectory.
Embed the climate spend inside procurement, not outside it. Treating climate risk as a sustainability cost line subordinates it to the ESG budget. Treating it as a procurement and resilience investment puts it in the budget that matters, which is the cost-of-goods budget that the CFO defends quarterly.
Nature-based supply chain investments are the asset class designed for exactly this purpose. They sit inside the value chain, they reduce climate-linked supply risk, they generate verifiable Scope 3 reductions, and they produce the documentation an auditor and a regulator can both test.
If you are quantifying climate-linked supply chain risk in advance of the next earnings cycle or the next disclosure period, the carbon and sustainability experts at Carbon Credit Capital can help you map your exposure and structure a Dual-Value Model response that addresses reduction, resilience, and disclosure-readiness in a single program. Schedule a consultation.
More and more small and medium-sized businesses are hearing the same question from their larger customers: What is your carbon footprint? That question now travels down entire supply chains, and it arrives next to tender requirements, certification criteria, and rising customer expectations.
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