Reflections on New York Climate Week 2025

Oct 2

October 2, 2025

Written by Benedikt von Butler, CoFounder of Restoration Climate

A cynic might say that, by now, only the hardcore believers are still attending Climate Week to enjoy each other’s company. Well, I was glad to see many of those believers were from JP Morgan, Northern Trust, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Standard Chartered, Deloitte, EY, etc.

Overall, I found the mood to be unexpectedly upbeat and hands on, more pragmatic than idealistic.

The 1000+ events at Climate Week addressed myriad issues, such as physical climate risk, the role of insurance, the impact of AI, the urgent need to reduce methane emissions, and the development of carbon removal technology. Below I want to share my (subjective) top five themes and takeaways specifically around carbon pricing and carbon markets.

1) “You Can Only Manage What You Can Measure”

Once you can measure it, you can manage it. And then regulate it.

This year, I noticed real progress in both emissions measurement technologies and carbon accounting. Watershed, for example, announced that its Product Footprints now use AI “to measure and act on the emissions of any product, material, or process in your supply chain”[i] - a critical step in tackling notoriously hard-to-measure supply chain emissions. Similarly, I met with several remote sensing companies who are rapidly expanding their measurement capabilities from CO2 and methane emissions to tree cover, biodiversity, soil carbon and ocean health.[ii]

Accounting frameworks are evolving just as quickly. The GHG Protocol announced a strategic partnership with ISO, stating “A new era begins in carbon accounting as ISO and GHG Protocol agree to harmonize their existing portfolios of GHG standards and to co-develop new standards for GHG emissions measurement and reporting”.[iii]

Meanwhile, we saw the launch of the Task Force for Corporate Action Transparency (TCAT), a “new initiative dedicated to strengthening the credibility of corporate climate action through transparent, verified, and third-party assurable accounting and reporting guidance.”[iv] Similarly, the EFI Foundation recently published a new white paper around carbon accounting and is pushing for harmonization.[v]

Takeaway: Soon, companies won’t just measure CO₂ emissions down to the kilogram - they’ll report them under harmonized standards. Once regulators have that information, regulation inevitably follows. Measurement and reporting are the Trojan horses of carbon regulation.

2) Carbon Going Global

Several panels during NY Climate Week highlighted the steady growth of global carbon pricing. Today, already 28% of global emissions are covered by compliance schemes or carbon taxes across 55 jurisdictions[vi]. 15 new carbon pricing schemes are in development, that would lead global coverage to reach 34% by 2030[vii].

Today, the two most prominent international frameworks are the EU Emissions Trading System (EUETS) and Article 6 of the Paris Agreement. Though regional, the EUETS now exerts global influence via the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM).[viii] Starting in 2026, importers of goods like steel, cement, and aluminum will have to pay the EU carbon price unless they can prove they already paid an equivalent price in their home country. This “top-up” mechanism effectively exports carbon pricing worldwide, since producer countries would rather collect those revenues themselves than transfer them to the EU. As a result, new schemes are under development in China, India, Brazil, Turkey, Mexico, and others.

Meanwhile, Article 6 of the Paris Agreement[ix] enables countries to generate compliance-grade carbon credits that can be used abroad, subject to a “corresponding adjustment.” Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Switzerland already allow such credits to count towards their NDC targets, whereby CORSIA[x] — the aviation sector’s offsetting scheme — remains the largest single source of demand.

Takeaway: Carbon pricing is going global, a trend that will accelerate as emissions data becomes more precise and comparable. At the same time, project-based credits are maturing from voluntary marketing tools into regulated compliance instruments.

3) Greenwashing to Greenhushing to Greenvoicing

Carbon credits seem to have regained their self-confidence. The pendulum that swung from greenwashing to greenhushing is now settling into a more pragmatic middle ground, where climate claims are credible and substantiated. Verified carbon credits are increasingly recognized as “success certificates” that help finance mitigation activities.

Climate Week saw the launch of the VCM+ coalition, which advocates the use of carbon credits to mobilize $100bn in climate finance.[xi] Other existing relevant initiatives include the Beyond Alliance[xii] (their “Voices from the carbon market” movie launched last week[xiii]), Reduce and Invest[xiv], Symbiosis Coalition[xv], Kinetic Coalition[xvi], and the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM)[xvii].

The latter is a registry-agnostic organisation that has developed the “Core Carbon Principles” (CCP) to establish a global benchmark for high-integrity carbon credits. Unlike third-party ratings that go into granular, project-specific quality details, the CCP certification means that all credits with a CCP label are “good enough” for purpose. In that sense, the CCP label acts as binary benchmark. To date, only a small share of credits meet the CCP quality criteria, but the supply is growing.

Relatedly, the “Coalition to Grow Carbon Markets”[xviii], a government-led initiative to strengthen voluntary demand for carbon credits, is actively working on establishing “shared principles” to be launched during COP30 in Brazil. These shared principles aim to establish concrete policy measures to support demand for high-quality carbon credits, such as those designated with a CCP or Art 6 label.

Takeaway: The reputational cloud over carbon credits is lifting, thanks to rigorous measurement and conservative accounting. With explicit government backing and strong private-sector coalitions, CCP-labeled credits could become the standardized, actively traded benchmark for corporate carbon finance.

4) From Fragmentation to Consolidation

Carbon market infrastructure has long suffered from fragmentation: while major standards like Verra, Gold Standard, ACR, and CAR each operate their own registries, dozens of others issue credits through separate platforms or external registries, with little interoperability between them. Buyers wanting credits from multiple registries must open separate accounts, limiting liquidity and making it difficult to establish benchmarks.

The advent of a standard-agnostic quality assessment such as provided by the ICVCM creates a level playing field among the multitude of different carbon credits. Any credit with a CCP label is effectively “good enough” and is endorsed by a variety of governments. Still, the problem of registry “silos” remains, inhibiting easy aggregation and trading across registries.

Two approaches try to address the problem of fragmented markets:

Aggregation and settlement: Carbonplace[xix], backed by nine major banks, aims to connect registries, while the Global Carbon Market Utility (GCMU)[xx] is building an institutional grade clearing system. Exchanges such as CBL, CIX, ACX, or ICE[xxi] offer futures and tokenized contracts aggregated across patforms, though uptake has been limited by lack of standardization. The introduction and wide-spread adoption of the CCP label could help create liquidity.
Data harmonization: The new Carbon Data Open Protocol (CDOP) [xxii] , launched during Climate Week, seeks to standardize carbon market data across geographies and activity types. CDOP is a “cross industry, multi-stakeholder collaboration designed to standardize data describing carbon crediting projects and carbon credits across markets, geographies, and activity types”.

Clearly, a consolidation and harmonization of the multitude of existing carbon standards is underway, which should support liquidity and growth in the market. In addition to an aggregation of the established registries, which would alow active trading of credits regardless of their location on a registry, two new registry frameworks are under development:

CARP (Centralized Accounting and Reporting Platform)[xxiii] is an international registry framework under UN oversight specifically designed for Art 6 credits. It is currently under development and expected to be operational early 2026.
Several large financial institutions, such as JP Morgan[xxiv] and Northern Trust[xxv], are starting to offer tokenized carbon credits on their existing “digital assets” platforms.

While each of the centralization efforts holds merits and drawback, any of the three can create liquidity:

CARP around rapidly growing UN compliance credits authorized under Article 6.
Blockchain platforms with tokenized credits potentially feeding into the crypto space and marketed by established financial institutions, expanding the use case for carbon credits.
Established registries still hold over 99% of all credits. Once standardization progresses, eg via CCP credits, these registries in aggregate will have the most volume to offer.

In the future, project developers can decide whether they want their credits to be issued on CARP (provided they qualify), on one of the traditional registries, or on an institutional blockchain (all three are mutually exclusive). This competition will likely lead to faster and enhanced capabilities, as developers will lean towards the best service.

Takeaway: CCP harmonization and registry aggregation could finally enable standardized contracts, indices, and securitization — the building blocks of a global carbon asset class. At the same time, CARP and blockchain infrastructures create trust and extend carbon’s reach into compliance and crypto markets, opening entirely new sources of demand.

5) Carbon as a New Asset Class

EY presented its new whitepaper during Climate Week, titled “Carbon Markets: Steps to Create a Recognisable Market and Asset Class”, and states on its website: “Drawing on tested practices from commodities and capital markets, the paper examines six key conditions that would enable carbon markets to scale, as investable and trusted assets – in a process that engages the financial markets, wider investors, buyers and regulators necessary to accelerate investment and action.” [xxvi]

In my view several of the conditions described in the paper have been prominently addressed during Climate Week, such as “reliable data”, “regulatory frameworks”, “commoditization” and “standardization”.

While tokenization (as opposed to digitization) is not explicitly mentioned in EY’s paper, it is clearly the intention of Northern Trust’s “Carbon Ecosystem” and JP Morgan’s “Kinexys Digital Assets” group to create a new carbon asset class using their existing blockchain infrastructure.

Supporting the argument that carbon credits should count as a “climate asset” is the discussion around “climate liabilities” in the context of disclosure requirements (IFRS S2) and provisioning standards (IAS 37). In fact, carbon credits are increasingly being recognized as assets — typically as inventory if held for trading, or as intangible assets if held to settle emission obligations.

Takeaway: The carbon space is evolving from bilateral, marketing-driven purchases toward commoditisation and the recognition of carbon as an asset class, essentially a shift from Beauty to Duty.

Ultimately, carbon credits were created as a form of results-based finance to enable the underlying projects. But instead of cherry-picking the most “photogenic” credits for marketing, the next phase requires a scalable process where project development follows a merit order dictated by quality and cost. Standardization, liquidity around benchmark contracts (CCP and Art 6) and the recognition of carbon as its own asset class will be central to unlocking that future.

References

[i] https://watershed.com/en-GB/solutions/product-footprints. There are many other similar platforms, such as: Beehive, Persefoni, Sweep, Greenly, Greenplaces, Gravity, Optera, Pulsora, Envizi, Sinai, Net Zero Cloud

[ii] www.planet.com; www.chloris.earth; www.carbonmapper.org; www.satelligence.com; www.mittilabs.earth

[iii] https://ghgprotocol.org/blog/release-iso-and-ghg-protocol-announce-strategic-partnership-deliver-unified-global-standards

[iv] https://www.tcataction.org/

[v] https://efifoundation.org/insights/carbon-accounting-framework

[vi] https://carbonpricingdashboard.worldbank.org

[vii] https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pricing-greenhouse-gas-emissions-2024_b44c74e6-en.html

[viii] https://taxation-customs.ec.europa.eu/carbon-border-adjustment-mechanism_en

[ix] https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-paris-agreement/article6

[x] https://www.icao.int/CORSIA

[xi] https://trellis.net/article/verified-carbon-market-launch/

[xii] https://beyond-alliance.org

[xiii] https://beyond-alliance.org/from-the-ground-up