Emissions Trading Organizations

The Verra Registry

Verra is a global leader helping tackle the world’s environmental and social challenges by developing and managing standards that help the private sector, countries, and civil society achieve ambitious sustainable development and climate action goals. The standards and programs Verra develops and manages are globally applicable and advance action across a wide range of sectors and activities. Programs undergo extensive stakeholder consultation and expert review, and draw from four key components: standard,  independent assessment, accounting methodologies, and registry.

Gold Standard

The Gold Standard (GS) is a voluntary carbon offset program focused on progressing the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals and ensuring that project’s benefit their communities. It can be applied to voluntary offset and Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) projects. The GS CDM was launched in 2003 after a two-year consultation with stakeholders, governments, non-governmental organizations, and private sector specialists from over 40 countries. The GS for voluntary offset projects  was launched in 2006. The GS project registry – containing all projects implemented through the standard was launched in 2018.

American Carbon Registry (ACR)

The American Carbon Registry (ACR), a nonprofit enterprise of Winrock International, was founded in 1996 as the first private voluntary greenhouse gas registry in the world.

Winrock operates ACR to create confidence in the environmental and scientific integrity of carbon offsets in order to accelerate transformational emission reduction actions.

Climate Action Reserve (CAR)

The Climate Action Reserve (CAR) is an offset registry for global carbon markets.

CAR establishes high quality standards for carbon offset projects, oversees independent third-party verification bodies, issues carbon credits generated from such projects and tracks the transaction of credits over time in a transparent, publicly-accessible system.

International Emissions Trading Association (IETA)

The International Emissions Trading Association (IETA) is a non-profit association with more than 250 members who are active stakeholders in the international carbon and emissions markets. The organization was created in 1999 to establish a global framework for greenhouse gas emission reductions trading.

International Sustainability & Carbon Certification (ISCC)

ISCC is a globally applicable sustainability certification system that covers all sustainable feedstocks, including agricultural and forestry biomass, circular and bio-based materials and renewables.

Xpansiv CBL

CBL has established the first of its kind Standard Instruments Program (SIP) to build on market infrastructure to accompany and govern the launch of spot contracts for the settlement and physical delivery of environmental commodities across existing registries that can be determined as meeting certain defined, standardized criteria for market quality and performance.