When RMI surveyed carbon market participants over the past couple of years, the non-profit heard tales that will be familiar to anyone who has navigated the ecosystem’s confusing array of document and data types. Project developers reported spending up to 60 percent of their time dealing with requests for data. Buyers said due diligence could take as long as 18 months.
In July, the organization unveiled its solution: an open-source framework designed to “bring structure to the vast universe of carbon credit data.”
The potential benefits of RMI’s Carbon Crediting Data Framework (CCDF) are already evident in a pilot catalogue of carbon credits developed by Centigrade, a startup that is partnering with the non-profit. On display are climate projects ranging from fuel-efficient cookstoves in Guatemala to forest conservation in Mississippi. Potential buyers and other users can click through to a wealth of information, presented in standardized form for each project. Data points include number of available credits, estimated price and ratings from third-party agencies.
Hundreds of data fields
Underneath the hood of Centigrade’s system is a framework based on at least 570 fields, grouped into categories and sub-categories. The fields were chosen by RMI’s Carbon Markets Initiative team and integrate methodologies from major registries, including Verra and Puro.earth; quality criteria from the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market; and templates for suppliers, such as those developed by Frontier, a coalition of carbon removal buyers.
Widespread adoption of the framework would bring multiple benefits, said Bonnie Lei, an RMI principal. Project developers could make a single set of data available for potential buyers, eliminating the duplicative effort of replying to several different sets of questions. And buyers could assemble candidate projects in a data room for easy comparison.
Making it easier for buyers to assess credit quality is a focus of the project, added Lei. Free-to-access databases of credits already exist, including one developed by the Climate Action Data Trust, a stakeholder initiative founded by the World Bank and others. But the CCDF is designed to extend these projects by providing additional data.
“You really need to be able to go into these sets of fields that get into understanding the emissions components of the credit,” said Lei. “As well as the social, environmental dimensions, which we believe are really important and distinguishing for credits.”
One schema to rule them all
To realize the vision of a unified data framework, the CCDF’s backers now need to persuade market players to back it. One wrinkle here is that RMI’s framework is not the only game in town. Sixteen schemas have been submitted to the Carbon Data Open Protocol (CDOP), a stakeholder initiative designed to develop a common data framework. The project is co-chaired by RMI, which has submitted the CCDF alongside the others. Lei said she expected the different options to be inputs into a single framework that will be published in stages, with the first release planned for Climate Week NYC in September.
If and when the CDOP committee reaches an agreement, adoption will still be a challenge. “There are real costs in terms of coordination and implementation to pulling off this sort of standardization,” said Grayson Badgley, a research scientist at CarbonPlan, a nonprofit that analyzes climate solutions. “Everyone already has their systems in place and I’d imagine changing things comes with all sorts of edge cases and risks. First and foremost, the incentives and benefits of standardization need to outweigh those costs.”
It’s also worth noting that data standardization does not inevitably mean that project developers will share all the information needed to fully evaluate projects. “It’s equally important that everyone can access the actual project and credit data itself,” said Badgley. “That would help make sure that everyone — buyers, sellers, researchers — has the ability to study and evaluate the performance of both individual projects and the market as a whole.”
