Baseline. Monitoring. Validation. Issuance. Buffer.
Five linked steps, the same for every project regardless of size. A soil-carbon cooperative and a direct air capture plant both walk this chain — just at very different scale.
What would have happened anyway
Before anything gets measured, someone has to establish the counterfactual and file it as a formal Project Design Document under a registry's methodology. Get this wrong and every later number is a precisely calculated wrong answer. This is where we spend the most time, and where we've walked away from the most mandates.
Soil samples, remote sensing, direct monitoring
Physical measurement against the baseline, using whichever methodology the registry specifies for that intervention type — soil coring for agricultural carbon, canopy and root surveys for restoration, direct flow monitoring for mineralization and capture.
An accredited body checks our client's numbers, and ours
An accredited validation and verification body with no financial stake in the outcome reviews the baseline, the methodology, and the resulting figures — first at validation, before crediting starts, then again at each verification event.
Credits issue, serialized and traceable
The registry — Verra, Gold Standard, Puro.earth, or increasingly the UN's own Article 6.4 mechanism — issues serialized credits into a public registry, each one traceable back to a specific verification event.
A share is set aside against reversal
A portion of issued credits goes into a shared buffer pool to cover reversal risk — a wildfire, a failed injection well — and monitoring continues for the length of the project's crediting period, sometimes decades.
Almost never at Block 2. Almost always at Block 1 or Block 5.
The measurement technology mostly works. What fails is an indefensible baseline set too generously at the start, or a monitoring program that quietly lapses once the first tranche of credits has already sold. We watch both ends of the chain harder than the exciting middle.