Verra, the world’s biggest certifier of carbon credits, plans to review projects faster than it has in the past despite letting a quarter of its workforce go after losing $9 million last year.
Introduced this week, Verra’s new “risk-based approach” uses algorithms and staff judgement to categorise carbon credit projects by how risky they are based on factors like size and complexity. Projects deemed high-risk are now checked more thoroughly than low-risk ones.
While Verra’s new CEO Mandy Rambharos said recently that “faster does not equal to compromise on integrity”, carbon market experts have raised concerns that the quality of verification could suffer and more bad projects could get the green light.
Verra is also implementing as “digitalisation” initiative, which it says will help “enhance transparency and efficiency, streamline processes and scale up its operations”.
Digitally-submitted documents about a project will be fed into a “built-in engine” that “performs all the necessary calculations”, including working out how much greenhouse gas will be kept out of the atmosphere as a result of the project’s activities, according to Verra.
Losses fuel cuts
Over the last few years, Verra has been repeatedly accused in academic studies and media reports of approving carbon offsets that exaggerate the climate benefits they bring by reducing or avoiding the release of planet-heating carbon dioxide and methane.
Its long-time CEO David Antonioli stepped down in March 2023 amid falling revenues – which Verra gets mostly from taking a cut on the sale of credits – and rising costs. The carbon credit registry made a loss of $9.3 million last year.
Rambharos, a former South African climate negotiator who joined Verra from the Environmental Defense Fund, told a webinar for partners last week that the job cuts had been a very “difficult decision” in a “gruelling week”.
Justin Wheler, who heads the program management team that runs Verra’s registry and is responsible for ensuring the quality of credits, told the webinar that his department had lost staff as “no department was spared from that”.
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In response to questions asking how projects could be processed faster with fewer staff, he said the new risk-based approach would “compensate for the reduction in staff capacity” as it “clearly identifies where high levels of scrutiny are needed and allows us to focus our resources in those areas”.
Wheler added that the criteria Verra uses to judge project risk would not be released, comparing that decision to police not telling the public where speed cameras are. But he said the size and complexity would be two of the factors guiding “review intensity”.
Past mistakes
There are a number of known cases of Verra approving carbon credit projects only to later place them under review after media reports or whistleblowers raised doubts over their integrity.
Last August, the carbon credit standard revoked 37 rice cultivation schemes after it had identified a string of “serious failures” during a 17-month review triggered by complaints over the production of credits in excess of actual emission reductions.
Other projects have been suspended by Verra after campaigners raised concerns about Indigenous peoples’ lack of consent for a project in Cambodia, and sexual abuse and harassment in a project in Kenya. Both activities were restarted after Verra had reviewed them.
Just last week, Verra cancelled 5 million credits generated from cleaner cookstoves after a former executive at the project developer – who was also a former member of Verra’s board – was accused of fraud by US law enforcement over the alleged falsification of project data. He denies all wrongdoing.
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Trishant Dev, carbon markets researcher at the Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment, said Verra’s new risk-based approach “warrants careful consideration […] given recent instances of Verra placing projects under review after discrepancies are exposed publicly”.
Simon Counsell is an independent consultant and researcher who wrote a report criticising a Verra-approved carbon offset project in Kenya. He told Climate Home that given the criticism Verra has received, it is “surprising that they should think there are ‘low or medium risk’ new projects that warrant less scrutiny, especially when inadequate oversight is precisely what has led to Verra’s current financial situation”.
“‘Streamlining’ its processes might get new projects online quicker, and thus bring in more registry fees, but it won’t solve its credibility crisis,” he said, adding that Verra is branching out into “new and even more controversial areas” such as biodiversity and nature crediting. “It seems that ‘more’, rather than ‘better’, is still the organisation’s main watchword,” he said.
Joe Eisen, executive director of Rainforest Foundation UK, said it was difficult to see how the reforms “won’t further undermine the credibility of the system”.
“We have a situation where there are far more projects in the pipeline, less people to ensure the quality of the projects and greater commercial pressures to issue credits from them,” he added. “Not an ideal recipe for high-integrity forest protection.”
Carbon players’ support
A spokesperson for Verra pushed back against criticism, however, telling Climate Home the new approach acknowledges some of the different risk factors from different types of projects. For example, he said projects that rely on gas measurements from a meter are different to large land-based projects, where monitoring is more difficult.
The spokesperson added that the risk-based approach had been in development for “some time” and would “help mitigate the impact of the reduction in [staff] forces, but that is not the purpose of it”. The goal, he said, is “to focus the reviews where the risks are to reduce wasted time and increase scrutiny on the key issues”.
Sustainability consultant and carbon offset developer Chris Hocknell told Climate Home the changes were “desperately needed as delays in response and review times are a significant challenge for projects”.
He said the digitalisation is “a valuable enhancement” which “upgraded a surprisingly analogue system into digital, which is merely bringing things up to date with modern business”.
This will allow project developers to concentrate on “outcomes rather than admin”, he added.
But Hocknell said he feared that cuts to staff could slow down project review times – and that the decision to keep the risk-based approach’s criteria undisclosed “raises concerns, as developers lack insight into the specific standards or thresholds being applied”.
Clean-up job
Following the spate of critical media articles, there are several high-profile efforts underway to improve the integrity of the voluntary carbon market.
The Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM) gives a stamp of approval called the Core Carbon Principles to categories of projects regarded as high-integrity.
In August, it rejected existing carbon offset methodologies that are based on building renewable energy capacity. The body said those standards were not strict enough on judging whether the projects needed the funding generated by selling carbon offsets in order to go ahead – a key threshold known as “additionality”.
Another organisation called the Voluntary Carbon Markets Integrity Initiative (VCMI) aims to ensure that the buyers of carbon offsets only make accurate claims about their use and are transparent about the offsets they buy.
Felipe de Leon Denegri, a former carbon markets negotiator for the Costa Rican government, told Climate Home he had high hopes that Verra would play its part in this market-wide integrity drive. Having negotiated with Rambharos when she was with the South African government, he said he could not think of “anyone I’d trust more to try to revitalise Verra”.
(Reporting by Joe Lo; editing by Matteo Civillini and Megan Rowling)
The post Verra’s plan to review carbon credits faster with fewer staff raises integrity concerns appeared first on Climate Home News.
Verra’s plan to review carbon credits faster with fewer staff raises integrity concerns
SYDNEY, Thursday 30 October 2026 — In response to reports that the Albanese government is set to introduce draft legislation this year that would seek to ban data centres in Australia’s suburbs, Joe Rafalowicz, Head of Climate and Energy at Greenpeace Australia Pacific, said:
“These reports are a testament to the growing community opposition to these completely inappropriate AI factories that have sprung up across our suburbs, and Big Tech corporations should take heed — the data centre build-out must not happen without the endorsement of the Australian people.
“But the government can’t simply ship this problem out to regional Australia without addressing the fundamental issues with this extractive new industry.
“We’re already seeing a trend of AI data centre proposals moving to the regions, in areas that are more water-scarce, more environmentally sensitive, and next to sources of fracked and coal seam gas to support their massive BYO gas-fired power plans — a pattern we’ve seen play out in the United States.
“From the Beetaloo Basin in the NT to the Western Downs in Qld, we’re seeing a wave of AI data centre proposals that would see new gas fast-tracked to support their massive energy demand, and threaten to completely derail Australia’s energy transition.
“Just as suburban Australians are asking, “what for?”, regional communities like Berry Springs and Dalby do not want dirty data centres setting up shop with absolutely no benefit to their communities. Greenpeace is calling for a moratorium on AI data centre developments until strict and enforceable safeguards are in place to protect our climate and our communities.”
-ENDS-
Media contact
Kate O’Callaghan on +61 406 231 892 or kate.ocallaghan@greenpeace.org
AI data centre ban in suburbs would not address fundamental issues: Greenpeace
In the thick of the COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan in 2024, the UN climate talks were rattled by what can only be described as a major PR disaster. The BBC, Reuters and The Guardian all carried headlines, attributed to leading climate policy experts, that the COPs were “no longer fit for purpose”.
The articles outlined a series of reforms called for in an open letter signed by 22 eminent scientists and politicians, including a former UN secretary-general and previous UN climate chief, with a further 150 lending their support. The headlines shook confidence in the COP process, just as governments were wrestling over a new climate finance goal.
The Club of Rome – which handled the media relations for the letter – hurried to say that its “constructive, supportive ideas” had been “misinterpreted”. Negotiators kept calm(ish) and carried on, in the end landing the finance goal after some high-stakes drama on the final day.
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To my surprise, when I went back this week to read the letter again, I could not find the offending line about the COPs not being fit for purpose. The Club of Rome has yet to respond to my query about its disappearance.
Whatever happened to the wording, that sentiment has been widely shared. COPs have ballooned in size while the importance of their outcomes seems to have diminished since the 2015 Paris Agreement (with the exception of the 2023 COP in Dubai where countries agreed to transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems).
The same on the surface
Two years on from those painful headlines in Baku, has anything changed for the better? You might be forgiven for thinking not. Official decisions are still made by consensus rather than the majority voting some have called for to stop blockers.
Tens of thousands of officials, activists and business execs still scurry around the halls to an ever-growing list of side events, roundtables and dialogues, while deals still come down to rows, all-nighters and jargon-filled texts adopted to rounds of applause.
But it would not be true to say that COPs have completely failed to respond to the very real need to translate the words of the Paris Agreement into action in the outside world.
Global warming is projected to be around 1.3C lower this century than it would have been if the world had not committed to tackle the climate crisis under that accord. Developing countries have a valued space at COPs in which their voices have equal weight in decision-making, unlike in many other international fora. And most importantly, perhaps, there has been a subtle shift, tipping the balance away from negotiating towards doing.
Brazil branded last year’s summit in Belém as the “COP of Implementation”, corralling the sprawling Action Agenda into six axes. This was a bid to impose some structure on the mushrooming efforts between governments, UN agencies, cities, businesses and civil society to set targets and spur faster results on their pet issues, from methane emissions to health and adaptation in conflict zones. COP30 alone saw the launch of 120 “plans to accelerate solutions”.
COP30 roadmaps off the cuff
Meanwhile, as the formal negotiations drew to a close, it was clear that consensus decision-making was evolving into something a little more improvised.
With only around half of all countries on board with the idea of a roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels, COP30 President André Corrêa do Lago announced his team would put one together over the coming year, along with another on how to meet a global goal to halt deforestation by 2030. Those roadmaps will be launched next week, presented and discussed at COP31, though it’s still unclear whether or how they’ll be incorporated into the formal negotiating agenda.
Some leading policy-makers don’t think that matters too much. Speaking to journalists before the Antalya summit, COP30 CEO Ana Toni and Dutch climate minister Stientje van Veldhoven said “coalitions of the willing” can move ahead without needing consensus from the COPs. This, they said, was evident this year at the first global conference on TAFF, co-chaired by van Veldhoven and attended by 60 countries.
“Consensus or no-consensus in the general COP doesn’t make a difference for the choices I have to make in my country to get my country to phase out fossil fuels,” said the Dutch minister. The Netherlands recently became one of the first to publish a national TAFF plan.
COP31 banks on flagship voluntary initiatives
This thinking has permeated the management and expected outcomes of this year’s COP too. Earlier this year, Türkiye, supported by international energy agencies, floated the idea of a voluntary goal to boost electrification to 35% of the world’s final energy consumption by 2035 – and this is now being touted as one of the main results to be expected from Antalya.
Türkiye is also championing a pledge on AI and climate, while co-host Australia is pushing to ease access to climate finance for least developed countries and small island states.
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None of these needs consensus. But with a political cover decision already in the works, as trailed by the COP presidents, they – and perhaps the fossil fuel roadmap – may find a home in the official text if language acceptable to most can be found, giving them them additional weight.
UNFCCC reform process in the shadows
Formal reform is underway too, if quietly. UN climate chief Simon Stiell is leading a review informed by ongoing consultations with a group of 15 well-respected climate policy experts, three of whom signed the open letter in 2024.
Among them is leading Swedish climate and sustainability scientist Johan Rockström who has strong ideas about how to make COPs function better, including a switch to majority voting. He told the same press briefing nothing stands in the way of this, because the rules of procedure for making decisions at COPs have never been formally agreed.
Still, to get away from the default setting of consensus would require agreement on a new system that may be impossible to achieve given the rise in bullying tactics by fossil fuel heavyweights.
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The deliberations with the high-level policy gurus, as reflected in a summary of June’s session in Bonn, largely echo what’s already happening organically, calling for stronger partnerships and accountability both in and between the Action Agenda and negotiations. It doesn’t mention voting.
A general overview of the reform exercise says that “improving and optimizing the [UN climate] process over the medium to long term… will be critical to fostering trust, enhancing collaboration, and catalyzing increased ambition”.
In the short term, don’t hold your breath for anything concrete on reform at COP31 but watch for signs in what ends up dominating the headlines from Türkiye.
The post Editor’s Desk: COP reform is happening quietly, behind the headlines appeared first on Climate Home News.
Editor’s Desk: COP reform is happening quietly, behind the headlines
With the COP31 climate summit in Turkey looming, all eyes are on China to see what the country will push for in the negotiations.
At COP30 last year, China helped to secure a “dialogue” on climate-related “unilateral trade measures”, as well as a two-year “work programme” concerning climate finance.
The nation also championed south-south cooperation throughout the conference and co-led a summit on methane, alongside Brazil and the UK.
In a recent press conference, China’s environment vice-minister Li Gao noted the need to “uphold multilateralism” and send a “clear political signal” that the global community is united around climate action.