A major certification body for jurisdictional carbon programmes issued just under 1.1 million credits to Costa Rica, a share of which are the first removals certified by the standard, it announced Wednesday.

Refocused – Equinor has scrapped its 2030 renewable energy capacity target and dropped a 2035 goal for CO2 transport and storage, as it shifts focus towards higher oil and gas output. The Norwegian energy major said in a strategy update Tuesday that it would no longer aim for 10-12 GW of installed renewable energy capacity by 2030, replacing the target with an outlook for power generation that also includes gas-fired electricity, energy storage, and trading activities, Reuters reported. The company plans to allocate around 10% of capital expenditure to its power business, while still expecting production to rise fourfold to more than 20 TWh by 2030, mainly from projects already under construction. Equinor also dropped a target to transport and store 30-50 mln tonnes of CO2 per year by 2035, with Irene Rummelhoff, head of its midstream, marketing, and processing business, saying the company had secured enough storage space to meet the goal if demand emerges but would not move ahead of the market.

The Paris Agreement Crediting Mechanism (PACM), a UN-regulated carbon market grounded in Article 6.4 rules, is guiding national frameworks, voluntary market (VCM) standards, and even other UN schemes, experts and country delegates said on the sidelines of climate talks in Bonn.

Retirements across the voluntary carbon market (VCM) were strong across the first five months of 2026  with volumes no longer concentrated at lower price points, according to new analysis, but removals purchases were down by 50% over the same period with questions over whether recent demand boosts will be enough to keep developers heads above water.

Carbon removal (CDR) buyers club Frontier launched more than $900 million in a new advance market commitment (AMC) while onboarding two major AI and technology buyers.

An ocean carbon removal research initiative on Wednesday unveiled plans to launch a $5 million funding round aimed at expanding a global research network for ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE), as interest grows in marine CDR technologies but questions remain over their scalability, environmental impacts, and monitoring requirements.

A project developer operating in Brazil hopes that a new rating will help its Amazon project set a benchmark to restore the credibility of REDD+, a representative told Carbon Pulse.

Verra and S&P Global Energy have announced that their "next-generation" environmental registry platform will officially go live on July 27, which they say marks a major upgrade for global carbon market infrastructure.

An environmental commodities broker and an energy trader have launched a second carbon auction, offering 100,000 Article 6- and CORSIA-labelled credits.

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) opened a public consultation on Wednesday on a draft international standard for net zero transition planning.

After more than a decade teaching smallholder farmers how to turn crop waste into biochar, the leaders of a climate tech firm said that beyond making the biochar itself, the real complexity lies in building the relationships and infrastructure needed to sell high‑durability carbon removal credits.

Malaysia and South Korea have agreed to cooperate on biogas development and carbon market initiatives, including potential Article 6 projects under the Paris Agreement, they announced this week.

Environmental activists are demanding answers about several agricultural carbon credit projects in Ukraine, arguing that insufficient transparency surrounding the initiatives raises concerns about the integrity of future carbon credits that could be generated under the voluntary carbon market.

SAF supply deal - EcoCeres has extended its sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) supply agreement with British Airways (BA) until the end of 2030, according to an announcement Wednesday. The deal terms state that the company's SAF is expected to help BA avoid around 198,000 tonnes of lifecycle carbon emissions compared with using the same volume of fossil jet fuel - equivalent to offsetting around 341,000 round-trip economy-class seats on direct flights between London and New York. EcoCeres's SAF is made from 100% waste-based feedstocks such as used cooking oil and can achieve lifecycle GHG emissions reductions of up to 94.4% compared to fossil jet fuel. The extended commitment reflects the importance of long-term partnership across the aviation supply chain to support the SAF market scale, said the release.

A new satellite-based assessment has found that industrial logging concessions across Africa's Congo Basin emit around 87.5 million tonnes of CO2 annually, while widespread adoption of reduced-impact logging practices could cut those emissions by up to 58% and unlock hundreds of millions of dollars in carbon finance.

Forming ties - Japan's Green Carbon said it signed a new agreement with the Department of Agriculture and Environment in Vietnam's An Giang province, which lies in the rice producing Mekong Delta, to develop carbon credits from methane reductions in rice cultivation using alternate wetting and drying (AWD) techniques. The company said it will launch a 100 ha pilot in 2025 and gradually expand implementation under Vietnam government's own one-mln-ha low-emissions rice programme. Green Carbon said it is targeting the generation of around 3.66 mln carbon credits by 2035 across its Vietnam AWD project portfolio, while An Giang is expected to become one of its largest project areas. It has signed cooperation agreements with authorities in 15 Vietnamese provinces since opening a local office in 2024.

New partnership -  The Carbon Removal India Alliance (CRIA), an industry body representing more than 25 CDR companies, has signed a partnership agreement with New Delhi-based advisory firm cKinetics to support the growth of India's durable CDR sector, it announced. The organisations said they will jointly develop research, stakeholder forums, and projects aimed at improving access to finance, market infrastructure, and positioning the South Asian country as a hub for high-integrity carbon removal solutions.

Increasing research and development, building out infrastructure, creating durable markets, and strengthening standards and measurement, monitoring, reporting, and verification could help tech-based carbon removals to scale in the US, according to a report from an NGO.

India's Bureau of Energy Efficiency (BEE), administrator of the country’s emerging carbon market, has launched a public consultation on draft rules governing Programmes of Activities (PoA) under the offset mechanism.

Project-based carbon credit markets are moving towards a more regulated, state-led model as voluntary standards remain unable to address weak oversight, fragmented rules, and uncertainty around credit use, a report published Wednesday said.

A California-headquartered carbon credit investment and project management firm has opened a regional office in Singapore amid its Asian expansion efforts.

Projects registered with the International Carbon Registry (ICR) will be required to include both a rating and a risk assessment – the first carbon registry to make such a move.

A Vienna-based climate tech startup has secured Austrian government support to establish what it describes as the world's first integrated laboratory dedicated to assessing the CO2 storage potential of mineral materials.

Oil and gas companies have spent over $273 million to bolster carbon credit use in California’s emissions trading scheme, as well as shape early governance of climate-related market risks at a US financial regulator, a report found.

More than half of the world's largest companies now have net zero targets and nearly half plan to use carbon credits as part of their climate strategies, according to a report released Tuesday, highlighting the continued mainstreaming of voluntary carbon markets among major corporates.

A mangrove restoration project in western Senegal has been registered under Verra's Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) and Climate, Community, and Biodiversity (CCB) standards, becoming the second globally under the body's flagship VM0033 blue carbon methodology, its developer announced this week.

A Rio de Janeiro-headquartered mining company has mapped nearly $2.5 billion in estimated decarbonisation-related spending and warned that carbon pricing mechanisms could cost the company up to $4 bln from 2030 onwards, according to an annual report.

Verra has put a large Zambian REDD+ project on hold, six years after project registration, according to the standard body's registry.

KAI PACT - Indonesia’s state railway operator, PT Kereta Api Indonesia (KAI), has launched a decarbonisation roadmap aimed at achieving net zero emissions by 2060, with support from the UK government through the UK PACT programme. The plan targets a 25.8% emissions reduction by 2030 from a baseline of nearly 648,000 tonnes of CO2e, rising to 35.6% by 2035 and 78.2% by 2050 before reaching net zero in 2060. A key component is the electrification of around 1,039 km of rail infrastructure, including commuter rail services, the Jabodebek LRT and the Whoosh high-speed rail line. The roadmap also includes energy-efficiency measures, green building certification for stations and depots, expanded solar power deployment, and a shift from diesel fuel towards higher biodiesel blends, in line with Indonesia’s planned move from B40 to B50 biodiesel. KAI has already installed more than 3.4 MW of solar capacity across 66 sites and planted over 107,000 trees since 2021. Consultants involved in the project highlighted rail’s relatively small contribution to Indonesia’s transport emissions - around 1%, compared with roughly 89% from road transport - arguing that expanding and electrifying rail services could play a significant role in reducing overall transport-sector emissions by encouraging a shift away from private vehicles. The UK-backed initiative also includes studies on B50 biodiesel adoption, diesel-to-electric rail conversion, signalling upgrades, and financing mechanisms designed to help KAI access international climate finance, including sustainability bonds and other green investment instruments. (ecobiz.asia)

A UN-backed restoration finance facility has partnered with a Peru-focused nature-based solutions developer to help advance a pipeline of community-led forest restoration and conservation projects targeting carbon, biodiversity, and sustainable land-use outcomes across Latin America.

The UK government should incorporate project-level ratings assessments when they integrate domestic carbon removals into their Emissions Trading System (ETS), a ratings agency said Tuesday.

A group of companies including Danone, Nestle, and Unilever, shared a set of recommendations on Tuesday which it says could accelerate a European agricultural transition under the bloc’s Carbon Removal Carbon Farming (CRCF) regulation.

A Helsinki-based carbon removal (CDR) registry has surpassed one million retired carbon credits, after retirements more than doubled in 2025, the company announced on Tuesday.

Verra published its first framework to quantify emissions reductions in marine transport Tuesday in an effort to support alternative low-carbon fuels in shipping.

Kenya's recent announcement that it will limit Article 6 transfers to 10 million Internationally Transferred Mitigation Outcomes (ITMOs) between 2026 and 2030 surprised many market participants, particularly given the scale of the country's existing carbon project pipeline, and may signal a fundamental shift for project developers relying on voluntary prices currently languishing in single-digit figures.

A voluntary carbon standard, a research non-profit, and an emirate in the UAE have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to foster carbon market engagement, including on the Paris Agreement’s Article 6, among other sustainable development objectives.

A carbon project developer has pitched contracted durability mechanisms as a way to manage reversal risk, suggesting these buffer pool alternatives could equalise nature- and tech-based removal credits under the newly-introduced requirements of the Science-based Targets initiative’s (SBTi) latest Corporate Net-Zero Standard.

A project developer lobby group has thrown its weight behind a new stakeholder initiative that aims to boost the number of credits available for CORSIA to around 250 million by the spring of 2027.

A Swedish bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) project developer has signed long-term agreements to supply permanent carbon removal (CDR) to two real estate companies, it announced Tuesday.

A coalition of agricultural, climate, and carbon market organisations has called on the European Commission to take urgent action to ensure demand for carbon farming credits, warning that the success of the EU's Carbon Removals and Carbon Farming (CRCF) regulation depends on creating a viable market for farmers.

Nodal Exchange launched several new environmental futures and options contracts, including for CORSIA.

CORSIA futures were little changed last week, with benchmark contracts on ICE slipping below $10/tonne mark after stabilising in recent weeks following a prolonged decline.

From Mexico to Brazil, state support and regulations appear to be influencing the scale and bonus attributes that carbon project developers plan for in their initiatives.

Zimbabwean officials met Friday in Bonn with members of CORSIA’s Technical Advisory Body (TAB) to understand the TAB’s limits on involving national registries in the scheme, a country representative told Carbon Pulse, citing high stakes for standards and host countries alike.

The introduction of specific price anchors for companies choosing to set an internal carbon price under the newly released Science Based Targets initiative's (SBTi) Corporate Net-Zero Standard, will help to 'avoid race-to-the-bottom dynamics' and provide viable financial support to many carbon projects, according to experts.

Governments around the world have urged the EU to simplify what they describe as overly prescriptive and complex requirements for complying with its Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM).

A carbon markets investment firm has hired a new client solutions director from an enhanced rock weathering (ERW) developer, it was announced Monday.

Guyana’s jurisdictional REDD+ (J-REDD+) programme is blowing past prior annual revenue figures, bringing in some $196 million this year, according to Carbon Pulse calculations based on statements made by the government.

The Norwegian state energy agency, Enova, is looking to launch an auction scheme for carbon capture and storage, open to a wide variety of technology types and with a budget ceiling of €1.7 billion for carbon removal, the agency announced on Monday.

Every bit counts - Seoul Energy Corporation has signed a MoU with climate fintech firm Hooxi Partners to help citizens monetise their GHG reductions, starting with rooftop solar installations, they announced Monday. The government has been promoting citizen-led carbon reduction projects, though these contributions are often underutilised due to complex certification procedures, the companies said. Hooxi Partners plans to use its AI platform to streamline the process, allowing participants to earn profits simply by inputting their facility data.

A Seoul-headquartered procurement platform for Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) and carbon credits has acquired a Singapore-based consultancy, it announced Monday.

Indonesia is looking to launch an international sale of forestry carbon credits next month, offering more than 30 million tonnes of emission reductions to global buyers, according to officials.

A coalition of environmental NGOs has triggered an internal review of the European Commission’s newly adopted methodologies for biogenic carbon removals, arguing they breach the EU’s Carbon Removals and Carbon Farming (CRCF) Regulation and could end up increasing emissions rather than cutting them.

Carbon standard Verra has reinstated four additional Chinese forestry and grassland carbon projects following a review of their government authorisations, according to a developer.

ASX-listed digital infrastructure company NoviqTech on Monday annouced a CEO shakeup and the complete divestment of its supply chain traceability platforms in a move to pivot the company’s focus to its carbon removal (CDR) business.

Global biochar production has nearly tripled in the past two years and is projected to reach more than 9 million tonnes annually by the end of the decade, as the carbon removal technology moves from an emerging industry into large-scale commercial deployment, according to a new market report.