Director of Sustainability Marketing
10 min read
As more businesses enter the voluntary carbon market (VCM), many are concerned about a key part of the due diligence process: how to evaluate and choose carbon credit suppliers.
Selecting a supplier is often more complex than it appears, and certainly more complex than it is for many other types of purchases.
Why selecting carbon credit suppliers is strategic
The VCM contains significant variation in credit quality, transparency, and risk levels. Choosing the right carbon credit supplier can determine the quality of the credits you receive, the risk your company is exposed to, and how defensible your carbon credit strategy appears to investors and stakeholders.
Carbon credit suppliers are not just intermediaries. Some may be actively involved in project development, while others will apply their own due diligence criteria to influence what credits are available to you.
If your company is looking to buy carbon credits, think of supplier selection as a strategic decision - one that affects cost, quality, and the impact and credibility of your climate action. Ask a lot of questions, and take your time.
Long-term partnerships
Unlike many procurement categories, carbon credit purchasing is rarely a one-off transaction. Most businesses are building multi-year climate strategies, often aligned to net-zero targets. This means working with carbon credit suppliers over time, rather than making isolated purchases.
Strong suppliers act as long-term partners. They help you navigate a complex and evolving market, provide access to high-quality carbon credit projects, and support decision-making as standards, methodologies, and best practices change.
This is particularly important as the voluntary carbon market continues to evolve. Buyers are not just selecting carbon credit companies; they are selecting partners who can help them build a credible and adaptable climate strategy.
Delivery risk
Carbon credits are not a uniform commodity. Each project carries its own delivery risks, from underperformance to delays or methodological changes. The role of a supplier is to help you manage and mitigate these risks.
High-quality carbon credit suppliers conduct rigorous carbon credit due diligence before offering projects to buyers. This includes assessing project developers, verifying methodologies, and analysing real-world performance data.
Frameworks such as Ecologi’s Carbon Project Assessment Framework (CPAF) reflect this approach, combining standard-, methodology-, and project-level analysis to evaluate both quality and risk. Without this layer of due diligence, buyers are exposed to risks that may not be visible at the point of purchase.
Price exposure
Supplier selection also has direct implications for how much you end up paying for carbon credits. Prices in the carbon credit market vary widely depending on quality, project type, and supply dynamics. Higher-integrity carbon credits, particularly removals, are often more expensive and in shorter supply.
Suppliers influence how buyers access this market. They determine which projects are available, how pricing is structured, and whether buyers can secure access to high-quality supply over time.
A supplier with strong market access and sourcing capabilities can help manage price exposure, particularly through forward contracts or offtake agreements. A weaker supplier may leave buyers reliant on the spot market by always ‘back-to-backing’ their purchases, increasing exposure to price volatility and limited availability.
Choosing a carbon credit supplier is fundamentally about assessing how they evaluate projects. The question is not just what credits they offer, but how those credits have been selected.
Portfolio diversification
One of the clearest signals of a trustworthy supplier is a portfolio approach. Rather than relying on a single project or project type, high-quality suppliers build diversified portfolios across geographies, methodologies, and risk profiles. This helps spread risk and ensures a more balanced mix of impact.
This also aligns with best practice across the voluntary carbon market. Different project types carry different strengths and risks. Nature-based projects may offer strong co-benefits but carry permanence risks. Engineered removals offer durability but are still scaling and often more expensive.
A diversified portfolio allows buyers to balance these trade-offs over time. Suppliers should be able to clearly explain how their portfolio is constructed and how different projects contribute to overall quality and risk management.
Ratings consensus
Independent carbon credit ratings are becoming an increasingly important part of carbon credit project evaluation. Organisations such as BeZero Carbon, Sylvera, and Calyx Global provide detailed assessments of project quality, drawing on data such as project design, additionality, and geospatial analysis.
However, no single rating tells the full story. Leading suppliers seek consensus across ratings methodologies, comparing multiple independent assessments to identify areas of consensus and divergence. Where multiple ratings align, confidence in a project’s integrity increases.
This multi-source approach reflects a bigger trend in how companies choose carbon credit suppliers. Today more than ever, buyers are looking for suppliers who can interpret complex data, rather than simply pass it through.
Direct-from-developer sourcing
Another key indicator of supplier quality is how credits are sourced. High-quality suppliers often work directly with project developers, rather than relying solely on secondary market intermediaries. This provides greater transparency into project design, implementation, and performance.
Direct sourcing can also improve traceability. Buyers can better understand where credits come from, how they were generated, and how risks are managed. It also reduces layers in the supply chain, which can help ensure that more funding flows directly to the projects themselves.
Ecologi’s approach, for example, prioritises sourcing credits directly from developers, alongside assessing factors such as project vintage, local context, and independent ratings. In 2024 for example, 75% of the credits we purchased were bought directly from the project developer. For buyers, this level of transparency is critical. It provides greater confidence that credits are delivering real, measurable impact and are not just being traded and re-traded across the market.
How to structure procurement
Selecting the right supplier is closely linked to how you structure procurement.
Different purchasing models offer different levels of flexibility, price certainty, and security of supply.
Spot
Spot purchasing involves buying carbon credits that already exist and are available for immediate use.
This is where most companies will start. It offers flexibility and simplicity, allowing buyers to meet short-term needs without long-term commitments.
However, spot purchasing is limited by what credits are currently available on the market. If you’re buying at a time when high-quality credits are scarce, prices might be far higher than they typically are. For this reason, although spot purchasing can be a good way to begin your carbon credit journey, we typically recommend it make up just one part of a broader, more strategic approach to procurement.
Forward
Forward purchasing allows companies to secure carbon credits that will be delivered in the future. This approach introduces more structure into carbon credit procurement. It gives your company better visibility into what they will pay in the future, which helps finance teams plan ahead, and it also helps secure access to high-quality supply before it becomes constrained.
Suppliers that engage in forward contracts will need strong project evaluation capabilities (or a partner who can help). They’ll need to assess not just current performance of the projects and/or credits, but future delivery risk - what’s the likelihood that these credits will actually be delivered on schedule?
Offtake
At the furthest end of the spectrum, offtake agreements are the most long-term and strategic procurement model. In an offtake agreement, a buyer agrees to buy a significant portion of a project’s future credit output, often over multiple years. In some cases, this commitment provides the enabling finance for the project, allowing the buyer to play a catalysing role in the VCM.
The offtake model is particularly popular with carbon removal credits, where supply is limited and development timelines are long.
Offtake agreements give buyers peace of mind, knowing that a future supply of credits is available to them. However, they also ask more of buyers, requiring a higher level of commitment and a stronger appetite for risk.
Evaluating suppliers is important no matter your carbon credit procurement model, but it’s especially important in offtake agreements. Buyers need trusted third parties (like Ecologi) who can assess a project’s viability and likelihood of delivering, minimise risk exposure, and structure agreements that work for both sides.
Risks in procurement
Even with a high-quality supplier, procurement decisions can expose your company to risk if they are not structured carefully.
Single-project exposure
Relying heavily on a single carbon credit project leaves your company highly exposed to delivery risk. If that project underperforms, is delayed, or meets with regulatory issues, your portfolio can take a significant hit. This is why it’s so important that carbon credit portfolios are designed with diversification in mind. Spreading your purchases across multiple projects means you’re less reliant on any particular project.
Liquidity traps
The VCM is not always highly liquid, particularly for high-quality credits. If your carbon credit procurement strategy relies solely on making spot purchases, you may find that the high-integrity credits you’re looking for aren’t available when you need them, or are only available at significantly higher prices.
This can create “liquidity traps”, where companies are forced to choose between paying a premium or compromising on quality - not a good outcome when your reputation and credibility are on the line. More structured procurement approaches, like forward and offtake agreements, can help mitigate this risk.
Claim misalignment
How you buy carbon credits needs to align with the type of climate claim you are making. If your goal is net zero, best practice guidelines (like the SBTI’s) make it clear that you’ll need to reduce emissions first by a minimum of 90%, and use carbon credits only to compensate for ongoing, and eventually residual emissions. Over time, your credit purchases should transition toward carbon removals. You need to be aware of the precise requirements of your climate targets before you buy carbon credits. A portfolio that relies heavily on avoidance credits, for example, or does not evolve toward removals, likely won’t support a net zero claim.
Ultimately, the way you buy carbon credits can’t be separated from the way you communicate about them. The type, quality, and timing of credits all need to support the claim you are making. Without this alignment, your climate claims may not stand up to scrutiny, exposing your company to both regulatory and reputational risk.
What this means for your strategy next
Selecting a carbon credit supplier is not a one-off decision. It is a capability that needs to be built and refined over time. In practice, this means learning to give carbon credit procurement decisions the time and expertise they require.
Here are a few practical tips for approaching this part of your carbon credit journey:
1 — Develop clear, repeatable criteria for evaluating suppliers
This includes defining what high-quality carbon credits mean for your organisation, how projects are assessed, and what level of risk is acceptable. Establishing this upfront helps ensure decisions are repeatable, defensible, and aligned across teams.
2 — Treat carbon credit supplier relationships as partnerships
The best carbon credit suppliers are more like partners than marketplaces. They’ll offer access to the best projects on the market, help you make sense of complex data, and inform you of broader trends in the market. Building a long-term relationship with a trusted supplier can mean better access to quality projects and a more defensible approach to purchasing.
3 — Balance flexibility with certainty
Relying solely on spot purchasing is a very flexible way to buy carbon credits, but it also reduces certainty by limiting access to high-quality supply and increasing your exposure to changing prices. Introducing forward contracts and, where appropriate, offtake agreements, can help you secure access to the future credits you’ll need to hit your climate targets, while also helping you keep costs manageable and avoid price surprises in the longer term.
4 — Think at the portfolio level, not the project level
Rather than focusing on individual projects, organisations should aim to build diversified portfolios that balance different project types, geographies, and risk profiles. This helps reduce exposure to any single project and supports more consistent outcomes.
5 — Document everything and make your decision-making process clear
Transparency and documentation are extremely important in a category like carbon credits. Now and in the future, companies need to be able to clearly explain why they selected particular suppliers, how they evaluated projects, and why their decisions add up in the broader context of best practice guidelines and the company’s long-term climate goals.
This matters for external reporting, but it also helps keep internal alignment across sustainability, finance, legal, and communications teams.
The VCM is maturing, and with more options come more complexity and confusion. Companies that take a structured, informed approach to selecting carbon credit suppliers will be in a better position to minimise risk, secure high-quality credits, and deliver a genuine climate impact.
Work with Ecologi
Selecting carbon credit suppliers takes work. It requires navigating a fragmented market, assessing risk at both the project, supplier, and category level, and building a procurement strategy that balances any number of objectives and tradeoffs.
Ecologi supports businesses through this process.
By combining a science-led Carbon Project Assessment Framework (CPAF) with deep market expertise, Ecologi helps organisations evaluate carbon credit providers, conduct robust due diligence, and build diversified portfolios of high-quality credits.
From sourcing projects directly from developers to structuring procurement across spot, forward, and offtake models, our focus is on ensuring that every credit delivers real, measurable climate impact.
If your organisation is exploring how to choose a carbon credit supplier or looking to strengthen your approach to carbon credit procurement, speak to one of our climate experts to get started.
See how the leading UK carbon offset providers compare on credit quality, Oxford Principles alignment, and regulatory support in our 2026 provider comparison.