Additionality is one of those rare words that mean more or less exactly what they say. A carbon project is "additional" if the reductions or removals it claims would not have happened without it. If a forest was going to stand anyway, or a peatland was going to refill anyway, then crediting it does not change the climate — it just moves money. This is the single test that separates a real carbon credit from a piece of paper.

It is also the test the first wave of the voluntary carbon market got most wrong. The early 2020s saw a wave of investigative reporting — most famously the joint Guardian/Die Zeit/SourceMaterial analysis of 2023 — which concluded that the great majority of forest-protection credits in some major standards were probably not additional. The market did not collapse, but it did, and we think rightly, lose its innocence.

The standards landscape since then has been a slow, technical, often painful process of putting additionality back at the centre. What follows is a working guide to the four documents that now matter most for European buyers, and what they each ask of a project.

The four that matter

Verra (VCS). Still the world's largest standard by volume. Verra's 2023–2024 rule revisions tightened baselines on forest projects significantly. New REDD+ projects must now use jurisdictional baselines — that is, they are compared against a wider regional rate of deforestation, not a counterfactual chosen by the project itself. This makes some old projects un-creditable. It also makes new ones more honest.

Gold Standard. Smaller in volume, larger in rigour. Gold Standard has long required projects to demonstrate a "barrier" — a financial, regulatory, or institutional reason the project would not otherwise have happened. The 2024 revision added a stricter test for what counts as a barrier in regulated economies, which is the part of the rule that affects European listings most.

ICVCM Core Carbon Principles. Not a standard itself but a meta-standard — a set of ten principles against which other standards are assessed. The ICVCM does not issue credits; it issues labels. As of mid-2025, only a handful of methodologies under any standard have earned the CCP label. We use ICVCM as a baseline; a Nordic Credits listing must either carry the CCP label or be on a clearly documented path to it.

EU CRCF (Carbon Removal and Carbon Farming Regulation). The European Union's own framework, in force from 2025. CRCF is, for our purposes, the most important document, because it is law. It sets the rules for what European buyers can count toward regulated targets. It demands monitoring methodologies far stricter than the early voluntary standards. It also introduces a vocabulary — permanent removal, temporary storage, carbon farming — that we expect to define the next decade.

What additionality looks like, project by project

It is easier to make this concrete than abstract. Three of our 2025 listings, and how each one satisfies the test.

Telemark Peat (Norway)

A peatland is being actively drained for forestry — that is the baseline; that is what the surrounding land does. The cooperative rewets it. The counterfactual is documented (forestry plans on file with the Norwegian Environment Agency, dated 2018). Without sale of credits, the cooperative cannot afford the dam maintenance. Additionality is direct and well-evidenced. This is the cleanest kind of case.

Tomini Mangroves (Indonesia)

Harder. Mangroves are protected on paper across Sulawesi but eroding in practice from aquaculture conversion and storm damage. The cooperative does not "plant" — they actively defend, replant where loss has already occurred, and maintain channels that allow the system to self-regenerate. We commissioned a third-party socioeconomic analysis to document what would have happened without intervention, looking at the rate of mangrove loss in similar bays without active management. The differential is the additionality.

The Hornstrandir Reserve (Iceland)

Hardest. The land is already protected as an Icelandic nature reserve. So what is additional? Two things: (1) the credits fund permanent maintenance of the reserve's infrastructure, which is otherwise contingent on annual government appropriations the local authority cannot guarantee; and (2) they finance an expansion buffer of 60 km² that is currently outside the reserve and at active risk. We credit only the buffer expansion. The original reserve area carries no credits at all. This is, in our view, the only honest way to do it.

"The original reserve area carries no credits at all. This is the only honest way to do it."

Each of these cases required between six and fourteen months of methodology work before a single credit was issued. We do not think this is a regrettable cost. We think it is the work.

The vocabulary, going forward

Three terms are worth learning, because they are now load-bearing in any serious conversation about credits.

Permanence. Carbon is "permanent" if it stays out of the atmosphere for a long time — under CRCF, the working threshold for permanent removals is several centuries. Geological storage qualifies. A forest that could burn down does not, strictly. The market is therefore moving toward separate categories: permanent removals at one price point, temporary or biogenic storage at another. Some buyers will need both.

Leakage. If you protect a forest here but the logging just moves there, you have not removed carbon — you have moved it. Modern standards demand explicit leakage analysis, often deducted from the credits issued. Our methodology applies a default 15% leakage deduction unless a project can demonstrate a lower figure with evidence.

Reversal risk. A peatland can be redrained. A forest can be felled. Modern standards require a "buffer pool" — credits held back as insurance, released only if the project succeeds. Projects in our catalogue contribute between 18% and 30% to buffer pools, depending on their risk profile.

The plain conclusion

Additionality is not a marketing word. It is the load-bearing test of the entire market, and a project either passes it or it does not. The European framework, as it tightens, is doing the necessary work of rejecting projects that never met the bar — and forcing the rest of us to write our methodologies in public.

We welcome it. We have, in our 2025 review, declined to list eleven projects on additionality grounds. Some of them are good projects in every other respect. They are not, in the strict sense, carbon. We told their custodians so directly. Several of them are now reworking their counterfactuals; one or two we expect to list in 2026.

This is, again, the work. If you want to follow it closely — including the methodology drafts we publish each quarter — our membership opens for spring 2026 in March. Or simply read the journal; it is free, and we make a point of writing the technical pieces so that an interested non-specialist can follow.