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Verra REDD+ credits in 2026: what changed after the 2023 Guardian investigation

By Yash Dhote · · 12 min read

On 18 January 2023, The Guardian, Die Zeit, and SourceMaterial published a joint investigation reporting that ~90% of REDD+ carbon credits certified through Verra’s Verified Carbon Standard did not represent real emission reductions when assessed against academic-quality baselines. Verra disputed the framing but acknowledged methodology weaknesses, and rolled out a new consolidated REDD methodology — VM0048 — through 2023 and 2024. VM0048 is an improvement on the prior patchwork of project-level baselines, but it does not retroactively fix the millions of pre-2024 vintage REDD+ credits sitting in registry inventories. Freight operators buying offsets in 2026 should know what changed and what didn’t.

I cover the credit-quality side of the EcoFreight blog. Carriers and shippers ask me about offset strategy regularly — it’s the cheapest-looking decarbonisation lever in a CFO’s spreadsheet, which is exactly why it deserves the most careful scrutiny. The 2023 investigation was a watershed for the voluntary carbon market; the policy and methodology responses since then have been substantive but incomplete. This is the honest accounting. Where offsets sit in the wider freight-decarbonisation arithmetic — relative to the SAF cost-per-tCO2 ladder or to the kind of operational moves the GLEC Framework v3.2 rewards — gets flagged where it matters below.

What the 2023 investigation actually found

The Guardian / Die Zeit / SourceMaterial reporting drew on three peer-reviewed academic studies that had analysed the baseline-and-credit-issuance methodology used by Verra-certified REDD+ projects. The most cited was the West et al. 2023 study published in Science, which assessed 27 Verra REDD+ projects and found that only a small fraction (between 6% and 8% by the analysis’s most generous read) of credits issued corresponded to actual reductions when projects were assessed against synthetic-control baselines drawn from comparable forest landscapes that did not have REDD+ activity.

The mechanism behind the gap was specific. Pre-2024 Verra REDD+ projects used "ex ante" baselines — the project developer projected forward what deforestation would have happened in the project area absent the REDD+ intervention, and credits were issued against that projection. Developers had latitude in setting that baseline, and the academic studies found systematic patterns: baselines were drawn from time periods of unusually high deforestation, from comparison regions with structural deforestation risk far higher than the project area, and from projection methodologies that didn’t correct for downward trends in deforestation that were happening regardless of the project.

Verra disputed the specific 90% figure as overstated, arguing that the synthetic-control methodologies the academics used were themselves contestable. Multiple subsequent analyses — including a 2023 follow-up by the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project — converged on the broad finding even if specific quantification differed. The core point was uncontested: the pre-2024 REDD+ baseline methodologies were inflating credit issuance relative to what would be defensible under tighter baselines. The Guardian’s original investigation is on The Guardian site; the West et al. paper is at Science.org.

Verra’s response: methodology VM0048

In November 2023, Verra published the first version of VM0048, "Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation," as the consolidated successor to several legacy REDD+ methodologies (VM0006, VM0007, VM0009, VM0015 and others). VM0048 was operationalised through 2024 and 2025; new REDD+ projects from late 2024 onwards register under VM0048, and existing projects under the legacy methodologies have a transition window. The full text of VM0048 sits on the Verra methodology portal.

What VM0048 actually changes:

  1. Jurisdictional baselines replace project-developer baselines. The most consequential change. Instead of each project setting its own ex-ante baseline, VM0048 mandates that baselines be set at the jurisdictional level — typically a country or sub-national administrative region — using a centralised methodology that all projects in that jurisdiction must use. This closes the most exploitable degree of freedom in the prior system, where developers could pick favourable comparison regions.
  2. Activity-shifting leakage is more rigorously quantified. The prior methodologies addressed leakage (the risk that protecting forest in one place pushes deforestation pressure to a neighbouring unprotected area) inconsistently. VM0048 requires a more standardised leakage assessment with documented activity-shifting deductions.
  3. Permanence buffers are stricter. REDD+ projects have always faced the risk that the forest is later destroyed (fire, drought, illegal logging, policy reversal). VM0048 requires larger reversal buffer pool contributions, particularly for projects in higher-risk regions.
  4. Additionality testing is tightened. The methodology requires more rigorous documentation that the protected forest would in fact have been deforested in the absence of the project — not just that it could have been.
  5. Monitoring frequency increases. Remote-sensing requirements are stronger, with more frequent verification cycles and explicit chain-of-custody for monitoring data.

These are substantive improvements. The jurisdictional baseline change in particular addresses the central methodological complaint. New VM0048-certified credits coming to market in 2025 and 2026 are meaningfully more defensible than the legacy vintages, and the market is pricing this differentiation: VM0048 vintages trade at premia of 30–60% over comparable legacy vintages on the principal broker desks.

What VM0048 does not change

Three problems persist:

Pre-2024 vintage credits in circulation. Roughly 90% of REDD+ credits currently in operator inventories and broker books are pre-2024 vintage, issued under the legacy methodologies the academic studies critiqued. VM0048 does not retroactively re-baseline these credits. They remain on the Verra registry and remain tradable. The Berkeley Carbon Trading Project’s 2024 follow-up assessment continued to find systematic over-issuance on these legacy vintages. If you buy a 2019 or 2021 vintage Verra REDD+ credit in 2026, you are buying a credit that the underlying methodology has been formally acknowledged as too generous — even though Verra hasn’t cancelled the credits themselves.

Jurisdictional baseline quality varies. VM0048 fixes the worst case — the developer setting its own baseline — but the quality of the resulting jurisdictional baselines depends on the host country’s forest monitoring data, governance, and political incentives. Brazil’s Mato Grosso jurisdictional baseline is being set with substantially more rigorous data than, say, a less-monitored West African jurisdiction. Credits from differently-jurisdictional projects under VM0048 are not the same quality, even though both bear the VM0048 stamp.

Permanence is still a 100-year problem. Even a methodologically perfect REDD+ credit faces the issue that the protected forest must remain standing for 100 years for the claimed reduction to be permanent on the time scale that matters for atmospheric CO2. Buffer pools partially address this, but reversal events (the 2019–2020 Brazilian Amazon fires, the 2024 Pantanal fires, persistent illegal logging in Madagascar) have repeatedly drawn on buffer pools faster than the buffer accumulation rate. The permanence question is not solved by VM0048.

The Berkeley Carbon Trading Project’s follow-up findings

The Berkeley Carbon Trading Project (BCTP) at UC Berkeley has been publishing systematic credit-quality assessments since 2021. Their 2023 follow-up to the Guardian investigation and their 2024 update specifically tracked: (i) whether the methodology fixes were being adopted, (ii) how legacy vintages were performing under post-issuance scrutiny, and (iii) whether buyer behaviour was shifting toward higher-quality credits.

BCTP’s 2024 assessment found:

  • VM0048 adoption was on track but slower than projected; legacy methodology projects were continuing to issue under transition windows.
  • Legacy REDD+ vintages continued to show systematic over-issuance against academic-quality baselines, consistent with the 2023 findings.
  • Buyer behaviour was bifurcating: large compliance and CDP-disclosure-driven buyers (banks, large corporates) were shifting toward newer methodologies and higher-quality credit categories (avoided emissions with clear additionality, technical carbon removal); smaller buyers with less due diligence capacity continued to buy legacy REDD+ at discount prices.
  • The aggregate VCM volume retired by buyers as offsets in 2024 was flat or declining vs 2022 — the post-investigation reputational risk of low-quality offset claims was driving some buyers out of the market entirely rather than toward better-quality credits.

The BCTP work sits on the Goldman School of Public Policy site. Their methodology and individual project ratings are open-access; carriers and shippers running offset due diligence should be reading the BCTP’s ratings before buying any specific project’s credits.

My take: what to buy if you want a credible claim

A freight operator making an offset claim that needs to survive CSRD assurance, CDP audit, or third-party scrutiny should not be relying on pre-2024 REDD+ vintages, period. If you have a stockpile of these vintages, the question is whether you retire them quickly and quietly under existing claims, or hold them for de-risked retirement later, or write them down. None of these options is comfortable.

For new offset purchases in 2026, here is what I tell shippers asking:

  1. Technical carbon removal credits. Direct air capture, biochar, mineralisation, enhanced rock weathering. Cost: USD 100–600/tCO2 depending on technology. These are physically real removals with quantifiable permanence; they sit at the top of any credible offset hierarchy. Supply is limited and expensive but growing.
  2. Engineered nature-based removal with rigorous monitoring. Specific reforestation and afforestation projects in landscapes with strong host-country governance, third-party-verified monitoring, and proven multi-decade permanence track records. Cost: USD 30–100/tCO2. Buy on project-level due diligence, not on category labels.
  3. VM0048-certified avoided emissions credits from jurisdictions with strong baselines. Mato Grosso state in Brazil is the leading example; specific Indonesian and Colombian jurisdictions also pass scrutiny. Cost: USD 15–40/tCO2. These are the new-methodology REDD+ credits that pass the post-investigation tests, but they require project-by-project diligence to pick the strong jurisdictional baselines from the weak ones.
  4. Avoid: Pre-2024 Verra REDD+ vintages; "renewable energy" credits from regions where renewables are already economically dominant (no additionality); cookstove credits without rigorous usage monitoring; landfill methane credits from facilities where capture was already mandated by regulation.

The arithmetic that matters for a freight operator: if your annual freight emissions are 50,000 tonnes CO2e and you are claiming offset-based neutrality, you can pay USD 750,000 a year at USD 15/t for cheap REDD+ vintages that may not survive audit, or USD 2.5M at USD 50/t for nature-based credits with stronger evidence, or USD 15M at USD 300/t for technical removal. Most operators land somewhere in between. The honest answer is that offset-based neutrality at sub-USD 30/t in 2026 is hard to defend technically and harder to defend in front of an assurance provider. We have walked several mid-market 3PL clients through this trade-off; the recurring conclusion is that the dollars are better spent on the operational moves catalogued in the payback-under-18-months list, with offsets reserved for the genuine residual.

What this means for Scope 3 disclosure

One acknowledged gap that needs flagging. Most freight Scope 3 disclosures — the upstream transportation category 4 under GHG Protocol, the one I wrote about in the CDP guide — are gross-of-offset disclosures. Offsets typically appear in the company’s combined Scope 1 + 2 + 3 narrative as a separate line, not as a subtraction inside the freight number. Most CSRD assurance providers will accept this presentation.

But shippers who advertise "carbon-neutral shipping" at the customer-facing layer are making a stronger claim, and that claim now sits in regulatory crosshairs: the EU’s Green Claims Directive (proposed text 2023, progressing through 2024–2025, expected to enter into force 2026 or 2027) will tighten when a company can claim carbon neutrality based on offsets. The directive’s current text would prohibit climate-neutrality claims based predominantly on offsets without explicit substantiation, and forwarder marketing teams claiming "carbon-neutral delivery" on the strength of pre-2024 REDD+ credits should expect that to become legally risky. The Green Claims Directive sits on the European Commission’s environment site.

Closing

The 2023 Guardian investigation forced a real reckoning in the voluntary carbon market. Verra’s VM0048 is a substantive methodology response — the jurisdictional baselines, the tighter leakage and permanence rules, the stronger monitoring — and new credits issued under VM0048 are meaningfully more defensible than legacy vintages. But VM0048 doesn’t retroactively re-baseline pre-2024 credits, doesn’t solve permanence on the 100-year time scale, and doesn’t address jurisdictional baseline-quality variation. Freight operators making offset claims in 2026 need to be on VM0048-certified credits or higher-quality categories, not on legacy REDD+ vintages, and the offset claim itself should be carefully framed against the Green Claims Directive’s tightening rules. The honest path is decarbonisation first, offsetting for residuals at the back of the disclosure — not offsetting as a substitute for reduction. For comparison with the alternative decarbonisation pathway debate in aviation freight, see the SAF cost-per-tCO2 analysis.

Sources

Greenfield, P. "Revealed: more than 90% of rainforest carbon offsets by biggest provider are worthless, analysis shows," The Guardian, 18 January 2023 — theguardian.com. West, T. et al. "Action needed to make carbon offsets from forest conservation work for climate change mitigation," Science, August 2023 — science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ade3535. Verra methodology VM0048 "Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation" — verra.org/methodologies/vm0048. Berkeley Carbon Trading Project, ongoing assessments — gspp.berkeley.edu. European Commission Green Claims Directive proposal — environment.ec.europa.eu/topics/circular-economy/green-claims_en. Independent VCM analysis from Carbon Plan and Trove Research provided supporting context for the pre-2024 vintage assessments.