What are the ICVCM Core Carbon Principles?
The Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM) is an independent governance body whose Core Carbon Principles (CCPs) define what a high-integrity carbon credit looks like — regardless of which registry issued it. The CCPs cover ten requirements across governance, emissions impact, and sustainable development. Credits and methodologies that meet them can carry a "CCP-Approved" label, giving buyers a single, comparable benchmark for quality.
The voluntary carbon market has a comparability problem: different registries use different methodologies, so two credits labelled “one tonne” can mean very different things in the real world. The ICVCM Core Carbon Principles exist to fix that.
Who the ICVCM is
The Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM) is an independent governance body. Crucially, it doesn’t issue credits — it sets the quality bar and assesses crediting programmes and methodologies against it. If a registry is the issuer, the ICVCM is the referee that decides whether the issuer’s rules are good enough.
The Core Carbon Principles
The Core Carbon Principles (CCPs) are ten requirements a credit must meet to be considered high-integrity. They fall into three groups:
Governance
- Effective programme governance and transparency.
- Robust tracking on a registry that prevents double-issuance.
- Independent third-party validation and verification.
Emissions impact
- Additionality — the reduction or removal wouldn’t have happened without carbon finance.
- Permanence — the carbon benefit lasts, with plans to address reversal risk.
- Robust quantification — conservative, accurate measurement of the climate benefit.
- No double-counting — a tonne is claimed once and only once.
Sustainable development
- Positive sustainable-development contributions and strong social/environmental safeguards.
Why a cross-registry benchmark helps you
Before the CCPs, “high quality” meant different things on different registries. Now there’s a common bar that a credit must clear regardless of where it was issued. Methodologies that pass earn a CCP-Approved label, so a buyer can compare a Verra forestry credit and a Gold Standard cookstove credit against the same definition of integrity.
It isn’t a magic guarantee — assessment is methodology-by-methodology and the programme is still maturing — but it’s the most serious attempt yet to standardise quality across the voluntary market.
Where the assessments stand (2026)
By the ICVCM’s May 2026 decisions it had assessed 65 methodologies: 40 approved, 25 rejected, covering roughly 107 million credits that can carry the label. The pattern is consistent: consolidated, data-driven methodologies pass (Verra’s VM0048 for REDD+, VM0047 for reforestation, the metered cookstove methodologies, landfill and mine methane, most engineered removals, soil carbon under VM0042 v2.2 and CAR’s Soil Enrichment); older ones fail (the grid-connected renewable methodologies Gold Standard issues under, the AMS-II.G cookstove methodology behind most legacy cookstove credits, and — in May 2026 — ART TREES for high-forest, low-deforestation jurisdictions). Nine programmes are CCP-Eligible, including Verra, Gold Standard, ACR, CAR, Isometric and Puro.earth.
The label now has teeth on the demand side too: since 1 January 2026 a company making a claim under the VCMI Claims Code must retire CCP-labelled or Article 6.4 credits, and the UK government has proposed endorsing the CCPs as its minimum standard. Because the label attaches to a methodology version and is applied by the programme to individual credits, a project type is never “CCP-eligible” as a whole — which is why our certificates state the label per retirement, from the registry record.
Our screen
We treat the CCPs as a floor, not a ceiling. Every credit we pool is screened against the Core Carbon Principles before it can be sold or retired, on top of being registry-traceable, dated within the last 36 months, and checked against independent ratings such as BeZero and Sylvera.
What is the ICVCM?
The Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM) is an independent governance body for the voluntary carbon market. It publishes the Core Carbon Principles and assesses carbon-crediting programmes and methodologies against them, so buyers have a consistent definition of a high-integrity credit.
What are the Core Carbon Principles (CCPs)?
The CCPs are a set of ten principles defining a high-integrity carbon credit. They span three themes — governance (transparency, robust tracking, independent validation), emissions impact (additionality, permanence, conservative and accurate quantification, no double-counting), and sustainable development (positive co-benefits and safeguards).
What does "CCP-Approved" mean?
It means a carbon-crediting methodology — and the credits issued under it — has been assessed by the ICVCM and found to meet the Core Carbon Principles. It's a cross-registry quality signal: a credit can be CCP-Approved whether it was issued by Verra, Gold Standard, or another approved programme.
How is the ICVCM different from a registry like Verra?
A registry such as Verra issues and tracks credits under its own methodologies. The ICVCM doesn't issue credits — it sets an independent, market-wide quality benchmark and assesses those registries' methodologies against it. Think of the registry as the issuer and the ICVCM as the integrity referee.
Do you only sell CCP-aligned credits?
Yes. Every credit we pool is screened against the ICVCM Core Carbon Principles before it can be sold or retired, on top of being registry-traceable and dated within the last 36 months.
