The Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (Integrity Council or ICVCM) is an independent governance body for the voluntary carbon market (VCM). Its purpose is to ensure that voluntary carbon markets accelerate progress toward the objective of combatting climate change. It will set and enforce a global threshold standard for carbon credit quality, drawing on the best science and expertise available, with a view to also ensuring that high-quality carbon credits efficiently mobilise finance towards urgent climate action.
The threshold standard is based on the Integrity Council’s Core Carbon Principles (CCPs). It is implemented through an Assessment Framework applied at the level of both the carbon-crediting program and the category of carbon credits, to define which carbon-crediting programs and categories are CCP-Eligible. The result is a threshold standard and label that provide a credible, rigorous, and readily accessible means of identifying high-quality carbon credits. The Integrity Council’s work on the high-integrity supply of carbon credits is complementary to the work of the Voluntary Carbon Markets Integrity Initiative (VCMI) to develop a claims code of practice for the high-integrity use of carbon credits, and the work of other demand-side organisations.
This March 2023 publication includes the Program-level criteria of the Assessment Framework and the Assessment Procedure. This will enable carbon-crediting programs to better understand the Integrity Council process and the operational requirements against which they will be assessed if they apply to the Integrity Council. In Q2 2023, the Integrity Council will publish the Assessment Framework’s Category-level criteria and requirements, which will be Part II of the Assessment Framework.
Core Carbon Principles, Assessment Framework, and Assessment Procedure
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