Getting Your Carbon Credits Voluntarily

Carbon credits can be generated by entities that successfully reduce their carbon emissions or remove greenhouse gases from the environment. Carbon reduction projects that create carbon credits can sell them on the voluntary market to generate revenue. The ability to purchase carbon credits voluntarily (VCCs) from a project that has generated and accumulated them provides voluntary market participants with a means to offset their greenhouse gas emissions outside a formal regulatory or compliance framework.

Because they are tradable in this way, carbon credits can be thought of as a type of commodity. However, a credit generated by a particular project is inherently tied to the characteristics of that particular project – there is no uniformity or particular commonality between credits or between projects, so the common characteristics of this commodity are hard to ascertain. This means that the voluntary market is illiquid and non-uniform, creating hurdles for