The credits are issued, the project is certified and listed, and inquiries arrive… then… silence.
If that feels familiar, you’re not alone. In Ecosystem Marketplace’s late-2025 survey of project developers and brokers, only 6% of inquiries converted into deals. That’s a sample, not the whole market, but the shape of it will be familiar.
Founders usually believe the market is bad, or buyers just fickle. But we see a third explanation. A good share of the stall sits in how credits are presented and made usable. The good news is that’s something you can change.
Fewer tonnes, more money
The numbers suggest buyers haven’t gone away. Rather, they’ve become pickier. Retirements fell in 2025: by 4.5% to 168 million credits on Sylvera’s data, and by 7% on Carbon Direct’s, which counts differently. Carbon Direct also reports that climate commitments surged 227% over the same period. Pledges aren’t turning into purchases.
Yet Sylvera reports that total spend rose about 6%, to roughly $1.04 billion from $954 million. Fewer tonnes, more money. It seems that buyers are paying for credits they can defend.
So this isn’t a market short of good projects or no demand. It’s a market where buyers have become demanding and the sales process has become more complicated. After the handshake, your buyer has to get the purchase through diligence, then say something defensible about it in public. Most developers help with neither.
A certificate gets you into the room
Start with the first job. According to Sylvera, buyers now look at project-level ratings, the robustness of monitoring, reporting and verification, permanence mechanisms and community safeguards, with integrity frameworks like the ICVCM Core Carbon Principles treated as the baseline. Ecosystem Marketplace’s respondents described biodiversity and community benefits as essential. Certification is the entry fee.
So the file is the product. Your buyer’s contact is rarely the final decision-maker. They’re an advocate who has to sell your credit internally, to procurement, legal, finance, sometimes a board. Whatever you send has to survive being forwarded to someone who has never heard of your project.
Here’s the pitch most developers send:
“Our credits are Verra-certified and high quality.”
And here’s the version that’s more likely to do the work:
“The project restores [X] hectares of [habitat] in [region]. Carbon stock is measured by [method] and independently verified every [period]. The credits carry a [rating or CCP label, if held], and the buffer pool covers [X]% of the permanence risk. The full evidence pack is attached.”
The second version never says “high quality.” It lets the buyer reach that conclusion themselves.
A diligence-ready evidence pack is simply the answers procurement will ask for, answered up front: what’s measured and how, who verifies it, what happens if the forest burns, who lives there and what they get, what third-party ratings say. Put it in one place, in plain language, with the technical appendix behind it. This is where generic marketing runs out. A sustainability marketing agency worth hiring starts with the evidence, not the logo. Do it well and the 40-question form gets shorter, or arrives already half answered.
What your buyer can say, and what they can’t
The second job is communication, and since 27 September 2026 it’s narrower. That’s when the EU’s Empowering Consumers Directive (EmpCo, Directive (EU) 2024/825) began to apply, with no transition period, including to existing products and stock. Buyers with consumer-facing marketing have fewer safe things to say about credits. (For the full picture, see what EmpCo actually requires.)
Precision matters here, because this is the part most people get wrong.
EmpCo does not ban carbon credits. It restricts specific claims. It covers business-to-consumer practices, so it governs what a buyer tells consumers, not the credit sale itself. Under Annex I point 4c, a company can’t claim, based on offsetting, that a product has a neutral, reduced or positive greenhouse gas impact. Recital 12 gives examples such as “climate neutral” and “carbon positive” (we quote them only as examples of restricted claims, not as language to use). Generic claims such as “carbon neutral” need recognised excellent environmental performance behind them.
The European Commission’s Q&A from June 2026 adds a point that matters for this market: the ban doesn’t stop companies from communicating about their investments in environmental initiatives, including carbon credit projects, provided it’s done transparently and without being misleading. Those are the Commission services’ preliminary views, not a binding interpretation, and national rules may differ.
So the buyer’s question changes. It’s no longer “how do we claim neutrality?” It’s “what can we truthfully say about what we funded?” To be clear, we’re not arguing EmpCo caused the slowdown. We found nothing that quantifies that. It’s simply one more reason buyers need better inputs from sellers.
Compare two things a developer might say. First:
“Buy our credits to become carbon neutral.”
That hands the buyer a claim they may not be able to make. Now this:
“This project can support a statement like: ‘We fund [project], which protects [X] hectares and supports [Y] households. In [year] we retired [N] credits, in addition to cutting our own emissions by [X]%.’ Here are the facts behind each part.”
The first example above is the pattern to retire (and, again, the quoted claim is an example of a restricted one). The second describes the buyer’s real reductions and, separately and transparently, their funding of a named project, without implying any product is neutral. It isn’t legally approved wording, and your situation will differ, so get specialist legal review before anyone prints it. But notice what the second version does beyond staying safe. It gives a buyer something to forward, defend and repeat.
The premium tier is a communications tier
There’s a hopeful reading of all this. Sylvera reports a structural quality premium: BBB+ rated afforestation, reforestation and revegetation credits trade at median prices above $35, while lower-rated equivalents trade below $20. It also says highly rated credits have seen demand outpace new issuance for a third consecutive year. Sylvera sells carbon credit ratings, so treat that as an interested source, though the direction of travel matches what developers and brokers tell Ecosystem Marketplace.
Two credits can look alike on a registry and sit in different tiers. We’d never argue communication rescues a weak project. The rating reflects the project. But among sound projects, how clearly the evidence, co-benefits and claims are laid out is part of the difference, and it’s the part a founder controls.
There’s one more reason to write for a person rather than a market. In durable carbon removal, Sylvera reports roughly 100 to 200 buyers, with Microsoft accounting for 58% of tracked offtake volumes. That figure is specific to durable removal offtakes and shouldn’t be stretched to the whole voluntary market. But the lesson travels: the buyer pool for serious credits is small enough that you can know who they are. Write for that buyer’s procurement team and that buyer’s marketing lead, not for “the market”.
Where a sustainability communications agency fits
Our position is simple. The carbon credit market is rewarding developers who make their evidence legible and their claims usable, and that’s a communications craft. It isn’t sustainable PR in the press-release sense, and it isn’t a campaign a general green marketing agency would brief. It’s the work of turning what your project has actually done into something a buyer can verify, forward and say out loud.
If your credits are certified but your sales cycle isn’t moving, the problem may sit in how the evidence and claims are packaged. That’s the conversation we have with climate founders and credit buyers. Book a sustainability communications audit.
Sources
- Carbon Direct, 2026 State of the Voluntary Carbon Market
- Sylvera, Carbon market trends
- Ecosystem Marketplace, VCM demand outlook in 2026
- European Commission, Q&A on Directive (EU) 2024/825, Brussels, June 2026
- Senken, Empowering Consumers Directive: practitioner summary
This article is for general information and is not legal advice.
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