Carbon market's bottleneck has moved to the verification layer

The voluntary carbon market has been fixing its supply: registries now require every project to be verified, and buyers, in Christie Pollet-Young's telling, have moved past price as the deciding variable, "conducting due diligence and hiring reputable verification bodies" while pricing, she says, "is not the only factor at play." What the market has not done is invite the people who perform that verification into the rooms where the rules get written.

That is the ask Pollet-Young, climate vice president at SCS Global Services, puts at the center of a statement published as part of Environmental Finance's voluntary carbon market rankings: third-party verification professionals, she argues, should be included "in the rooms where decisions happen, so their practical expertise can inform market design." A modest procedural request, in form, but really a claim about where authority in the market now sits.

The case for the ask is practical: registries mandate verification for every project, making the assessment layer a gate every credit must pass, and those assessments, Pollet-Young notes, "require extensive expertise and experience with very detailed and complex methodologies," with the work getting heavier as projects scale and a need "to do larger-scale projects and bring more experts into these areas." A gate that complex, staffed that thinly, is a bottleneck whether or not anyone calls it one.

Capacity is where the argument turns concrete: Pollet-Young frames the near-term need as manpower, "all hands on deck to engage and train experts, in all stakeholder roles, to scale market growth and impact," because verification is judgment-heavy work and the market's appetite for it looks to be outpacing the bench of people qualified to do it. A call to seat verifiers at the design table is also, read plainly, a call to treat assurance as a skilled trade the market has to build rather than a service it can buy off the shelf.

As this publication has argued, the bottleneck in voluntary carbon has moved from credit supply to market plumbing — the settlement, assurance, and transfer rails on which credits move. Pollet-Young's account is evidence from inside one of those rails, and it puts the assurance layer closer to the center of the market than its reputation suggests: that is where a good credit actually gets defined, project by project and methodology by methodology.

The stakes of that reframing are easy to understate: independent verification, Pollet-Young says, builds "trust in the quality and integrity of credits," and is the mechanism that lets a buyer assemble the diversified portfolios "everyone wants." That kind of trust gets made at the assessment stage rather than supplied at the point of sale, and when a credit's integrity is challenged later, the scrutiny tends to reach the verifier's signature first — a reason to care whether the verifier helped write the standard it signed against.

A second argument of hers is subtler and, for market design, more useful: verification is a risk-management function, and she concedes what risk managers rarely say out loud — "not everything is going to be perfect." The hazard she points to is the cost of an impossible standard: "if all stakeholders are constantly chasing a moving target, execution is hindered, and with it, the necessary flow of capital." Read as a critique of rulemaking that revises itself faster than projects can be built against it, that is an argument for stability in the standards, not only rigor in the credits.

There is a further mismatch in how one rule set meets buyers of uneven sophistication: the VCM is growing and "interest in projects is definitely there," she says, but what the market needs are "solutions to suit the varying levels of development and understanding by market actors." The same standard applied to a first-time corporate purchaser and to a specialist fund will serve one of them badly, and verifiers who sit across both see where the standard bends and where it breaks — precisely the knowledge a design table otherwise lacks.

The carbon accounting is the easier half of the work: community benefits, on her account, vary with "the way the project is structured, the presiding government and land tenure," and benefit-sharing "can be very complicated, especially if there are decades or centuries of history on that land." Confirming consent and transparency takes "a real concerted effort to comprehend local context," judged at the right level of detail, and those are field calls made under uncertainty — the kind a rulebook written far from the field tends to misprice.

SCS's own path explains why it is making this argument now: the firm began as a certification auditor for the Forest Stewardship Council, moved into the California Climate Action Registry — now the Climate Action Reserve — and verified the first forestry project under California's Cap and Invest Program, per Pollet-Young. That is a house built on the seam between voluntary and compliance markets, and it gives the firm a stake in the convergence she raises: assurance approaches that hold up in one regime increasingly have to hold up in the other.

For a market that has decided it wants higher-quality credits, the seating question reaches past governance: the people who help write assurance rules set the pace at which credits can be issued, the evidence a developer must assemble, and the point at which a portfolio can credibly be called diversified — a goal Pollet-Young says every buyer shares, and one she ties to independent verification. The convergence of voluntary and compliance assurance is the place to watch first. Whoever writes the common standard will have set, in practice, how fast the market can grow, and whether the verifiers who sign the work are also the ones who helped write it.