At Sustaim, we are extremely passionate about current developments in Voluntary Carbon Markets (VCM). It is exciting to see so many firms spend time and resources on enabling a more transparent and impactful carbon market, bringing expertise from all kinds of directions.

I personally spend a large portion of both my work- and freetime researching different projects. As a consequence, we have collected a comprehensive list of different companies active in the market. We decided to share a large portion of them via this report to help people better understand the company landscape and give a starting point for further research.

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Important:

This overview is labeled "Carbon" Market Company Overview. However, I strongly want to emphasize: Carbon is only one aspect of the larger picture. Other factors like biodiversity and the social impact of projects are equally important when conducting projects that lead to sustainable impact. Unfortunately, the concept of a carbon market has led some to the false conception that purchasing cheaper carbon offsets are as impactful as supporting more expensive solutions - as long as the carbon value is the same. This is NOT true in most cases. As a consequence, project developers are incentivised to focus exclusively on carbon numbers, while biodiversity and social factors are neglected, leading to unsustainably conducted and managed projects as well as social exploitation, especially in "developing" countries.

This is why some of the firms in this list don't specialize on carbon sequestration values. As for a lack of a better popular term to describe this market, we decided to use Carbon Market nonetheless.