Disentangling the State of Climate Protocols
Issue #78: A big little idea called durability
In this issue: Engineer, analyst, artist, and former Summer of Protocols visiting researcher Cory Levinson surveys current climate protocols.
A lot has changed in climate protocols in recent years. In 2023, when I first gave a talk on this topic for Summer of Protocols’ inaugural research cohort, the two previously disconnected worlds of traditional carbon markets and DeFi had only recently collided. The main character in that clash, KlimaDAO, had proclaimed itself as a “black hole for carbon” upon its launch and sucked 17 million metric tons of CO2 from suit-and-tie carbon market registries like Verra into its treasury, thus transforming millions of carbon credits into a new zombified onchain form that neither the corporates nor the degens knew what to do with. Regen Network, perhaps the oldest player operating at the intersection of crypto and climate tech, was in the process of expanding beyond its focus on carbon, taking in other environmental markets such as biodiversity crediting.1 While it may seem strange to be designing markets for biodiversity when we still can’t seem to get carbon markets right, biodiversity crediting has managed to attract attention from international policy players such as the United Nations Development Programme and UN Environment Programme through efforts like the Biodiversity Crediting Alliance. Regen Network soon found itself partnering with some very promising groups working in this sector, from the Colombian habitat bank developer Terrasos to indigenous leaders from the Sharamentsa Achuar community in the Ecuadorian Amazon.
Regen Network’s pivot to broaden beyond carbon stemmed both from a desire to resist carbon tunnel vision, and a response to a failing voluntary carbon market. The more traditional subsector of the carbon markets – consisting mostly of reforestation and avoided deforestation credits – had continued to face challenges, both from the plummeting corporate demand, which culminated in the Guardian’s exposé denouncing Verra’s REDD+ program in early 2023; and from continued slow progress instrumentalizing Article 6 of the Paris Agreement – a key piece of the international climate treaty that aims to clarify how nation states can trade carbon credits against their NDCs (nationally determined contributions towards limiting CO2 emissions).
Durability: A New Focus for Carbon Markets
Despite the world’s complete failure to put a meaningful dent in greenhouse gas emissions, over this same period of time a new and more focused carbon market in durable carbon-dioxide removal started gaining traction in both the regulatory and corporate sustainability worlds. A significant marker of this shift was the launch of Frontier in 2022, a $1B+ advanced market commitment for durable carbon removal led by Stripe, Alphabet, Meta, Shopify and McKinsey. This renewed focus on more permanent carbon removal and storage technologies (often abbreviated as CDR) represents a rebranding of the legacy carbon markets away from greenwashing and questionable “counterfactual claims” of avoidance-based forest carbon credits, and toward scientifically verifiable removals where the CO2 sequestered can be safely assumed durably stored underground or in the depths of the ocean for hundreds or thousands of years. The approaches and technologies being researched and deployed in the CDR sector vary widely, from highly engineered direct air capture facilities, to spreading pulverized volcanic rock dust over agricultural fields so that it reacts with and absorbs CO2 under rainfall, to electrochemically removing CO2 from the surface level of the ocean or otherwise altering seawater chemistry to enhance the ocean’s capacity to absorb CO2 from the atmosphere.
If this all seems bewildering and daunting, trust that it’s hard to keep track of existing and emergent CDR pathways even for those working in the industry. One could ask why we need so many different strategies for sequestering carbon out of the atmosphere. The answer to this question is, in principle, pretty simple. We don’t know which strategies will scale, and we need to scale very quickly. In 2023, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its synthesis report, stating that, even in best case scenarios for emissions reduction, an estimate of 5 to 13 gigatonnes (Gt) of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) will be needed annually by 2050 in order to limit global warming to 1.5°C and achieve net-zero emissions. So, at this point in time, the industry consensus is that we need to be funding, researching, and exploring all feasible pathways, with humility and understanding that any potential solution may, at any time, be deemed uneconomical, unsafe, or otherwise unfeasible.
A Protocol with a Thousand Faces
Protocols and carbon markets have had a complicated entanglement since the earliest days of international climate agreements. The predecessor to the Paris Agreement was explicitly titled the Kyoto Protocol, and prior to that was the Montreal Protocol (often touted as an early success of international environmental agreements). In contemporary carbon markets, the term protocol has evolved from being used to designate a singular stamp of overarching international consensus to instead operating like a Swiss Army knife of sorts. Whether in the corporate sustainability arena of voluntary carbon markets, or the nascent but rapidly evolving jurisdictional and international compliance markets, if there’s a problem with clearly defining something, or a lack of consensus regarding what exactly something means, slap the term protocol on it! The word itself becomes elastic, with varying focus and specificity that can stretch and shape to any context. In the context of today’s voluntary carbon market, the industry’s self-appointed governing bodies, known as “registries” (e.g. Verra, Gold Standard, Isometric, American Carbon Registry) publish protocols – programmatic rules which dictate what kinds of activities need to be undertaken to warrant issuing carbon credits, and how those activities must be monitored, reported and verified (a process which is abbreviated as MRV).
In this wild-west, funded predominantly by corporate do-goodism, competing registries beget competing protocols. Furthermore, with a seemingly boundless set of different sequestration pathways being explored, a key indicator of pathway maturity is how many registries have codified a protocol for a given pathway. Without any infrastructure in place to compare projects across different protocols, the market remains fractured. Prices vary across pathways and protocols and the industry has little consensus on which approach is right. Toss in the fact that we are still waiting on UN policy guidance detailing which methodologies (the UNFCCC’s term for MRV protocols) are to be approved for use in country-level trading of carbon balances under the Paris Agreement Crediting Mechanism, and it’s easy to see how neither the voluntary nor compliance markets can make up their mind about what’s good enough. The Article 6.4 Supervisory Body is still working through this task nearly ten years after the Paris Agreement was signed.
A core tension here is that despite failing to provide any concrete pathway to fungibility for carbon financiers (demand is still concentrated in a handful of players, and supply too heterogeneous), these protocols supposedly exist for the explicit purpose of making real-world carbon removal interventions legible for financial markets. In this way, to ask whether the MRV protocols of Verra, Gold Standard, Isometric or Puro function more as scientific protocols or financial protocols is a question of perspective. Scientific for sure, but their function as financial protocols remains aspirational at best.
Data Protocols Behind the Curtain
With the industry’s spotlight on durable CDR, the resulting diversity of pathways and technological approaches to carbon removal is likely the main culprit in our current protocol predicament. If carbon markets were still dealing only in forest carbon, the industry’s first attempt to solve inter-registry interoperability with the CAD Trust might have delivered on its promise. That story begins in late 2022, with a group including IETA (International Emissions Trading Association) and The World Bank launching the Climate Action Data Trust as an attempt to harmonize data schemas from the various carbon market registries. Key to their approach was developing a shared meta-registry: a new database for existing registries to report their own project and transaction data to that could prevent double counting and support interoperability between the various different carbon registries. As with many other double counting prevention initiatives in enterprise or business arenas, there was a blockchain component, and Chia Network was to serve as the blockchain technology partner in the project.
Fast forward to 2025 and CAD Trust still exists, but with the durable CDR market dealing in carbon credit off-take agreements the size of a Series C financing round (see Frontier’s $58M prepurchase of credits from BiCRS developer Charm Industrial), the CAD Trust approach of replicated harmonized meta-registry has done little to provide support in an area where much of the current market activity is in future-oriented offtake agreements. On top of that, CAD Trust’s focus on technical API integrations has made adoption slow among legacy registries like Verra and Gold Standard, and nonexistent among the younger durable CDR-focused registries like Isometric or Puro.
One thing CAD Trust did get right from the beginning was bringing data standards into the spotlight. In the years since, several other initiatives have followed their lead. The Carbon Data Open Protocol (CDOP) is likely the carbon market data standards initiative with the most industry traction today. Launched as a multi-stakeholder initiative, led by RMI, S&P Global, and Sylvera (a prominent carbon credits rating agency) among others, CDOP focuses on harmonizing data schemas and vocabularies between the many different actors in today’s carbon market. Arguably more important than what CDOP is, is what it is not. By electing not to build any infrastructure or host project and transaction data themselves, CDOP sidesteps the risk of becoming another value-extracting intermediary in an already crowded market, leaving open the possibility that the project could get enough traction to serve as a genuine interoperability layer.
In carbon markets, where data isn’t at risk of disappearing and transactions are often built upon trust between known parties, interoperability initiatives don’t necessitate the fully-replicated data infrastructure that blockchains provide. With this in mind, any initiative claiming to enable interoperability in carbon markets should focus its energy on developing open standards, exchange formats, and governance frameworks rather than building its own infrastructure and risk becoming yet another silo to navigate. For CDOP this approach is more than an implementation detail, it’s deeply embedded in the initiative’s branding and overall strategy (see their July 2025 blog post Carbon Markets Need a Berners-Lee Moment for Data Standardization).
Will this latest attempt to protocolize the carbon markets improve our ability to meaningfully scale carbon removal? Early signs suggest momentum is building. Even ISO is paying attention now, having initiated, in October 2025, a working group to develop a standard Data Model for Carbon Credit Markets, in which both CDOP and CAD Trust will have membership as nominated experts. If the scientific, financial, and data infrastructure continues to mature, the foundation will be there to support the gigaton scale CDR needed by 2050. Leaving one question remaining… Will the incentives and resources align fast enough to make it a reality?
Cory Levinson is a software consultant working on data standards in the carbon removal industry, serving as technical lead for Carbon To Sea’s Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement Data Management Protocol, working with the ocean science consultancy Submarine Scientific. He is an active member of the Carbon Data Open Protocol’s Technical Working Group, and is currently pursuing an MSc in the Soils & Biogeochemistry Graduate Group at UC Davis. Views expressed here are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of any affiliated organizations.
This text is based on a talk which Cory gave for Summer of Protocols in July.
Regen was founded in 2017, and I was working there from 2020 through most of 2024.
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