The voluntary carbon market spent the last three years living down its own headlines. Investigative reporting on phantom avoided-deforestation credits, the collapse of several REDD+ baselines under scrutiny, and a steady drumbeat of “your offsets are worthless” coverage left a lot of corporate buyers gun-shy. The reaction was rational. When a credit that a company retired against a net zero claim turns out to represent a tonne of carbon that was never at risk in the first place, the reputational exposure lands squarely on the buyer, not the registry. Greenwashing litigation and regulatory attention to unsubstantiated environmental claims did the rest. The market itself has now priced that risk: MSCI’s year-end 2025 review describes a clear bifurcation in which credibility now defines liquidity, and large-scale cancellations of low-integrity credits have made unverifiable supply commercially radioactive.

We are interested in the next generation of supply: projects engineered from day one to survive the level of due diligence that a serious offtaker, an Integrity Council assessment, and a skeptical journalist will all bring to bear. That is a different sourcing problem, and it is the one we solve. High-integrity supply is an underwriting standard, and it determines whether a project is financeable at all.

This piece sets out the size of the high-integrity supply gap and the numbers behind it, why Kazakhstan’s agricultural soils are one of the more compelling places to build that next generation of supply, how soil organic carbon projects work under the current methodology stack, and how pre-issuance and stream financing let a credible project get capital into the ground before the first verified credit is ever issued.

Why corporate net zero commitments still need high-quality removals

A net zero target is an accounting identity before it is anything else. A company commits to reducing gross emissions across Scope 1, 2, and 3 in line with a science-based trajectory, and then to neutralizing the residual emissions it cannot yet abate with carbon credits of equivalent permanence and quality. Under the Science Based Targets initiative’s Net-Zero Standard , the abatement comes first and the residual is meant to be genuinely hard-to-abate. That distinction matters for supply: the credible end of the market is increasingly demanding removals rather than avoidance, and removals with durable storage rather than easily reversible ones. The pressure is acute in retail and consumer goods, where Scope 3 emissions can exceed 98% of a company’s total footprint, leaving credits as the only realistic bridge for residuals after operational cuts.

Soil organic carbon sits in an interesting position in that hierarchy. It is a genuine removal. Atmospheric CO2 is drawn down by plants and stabilized as soil organic matter. When paired with rigorous measurement it carries co-benefits that buyers value: improved water retention, restored soil fertility, higher and more resilient yields for the farmers involved. The durability question is real, since soils can re-release carbon if practices lapse, and the current methodologies handle it through monitoring obligations, buffer pools, and reversal accounting.

The physical potential is substantial and well-documented. The world’s croplands hold an estimated 83 petagrams of carbon in their topsoil, with additional storage potential modeled at 29 to 65 petagrams. Under the 4 per 1000 framework , croplands could plausibly sequester on the order of 0.90 to 1.85 petagrams of carbon per year through improved practices. At the field level, peer-reviewed estimates put achievable sequestration at roughly 0.2 to 0.5 tonnes of carbon per hectare per year after adoption of best management practices such as reduced tillage combined with cover crops. Those per-hectare rates are the raw material every soil carbon project monetizes.

How soil organic carbon projects actually work

The dominant methodology for agricultural soil carbon under the Verified Carbon Standard is Verra’s VM0042, Improved Agricultural Land Management. It quantifies greenhouse gas emission reductions and soil organic carbon removals from improved land management practices including reduced tillage, improved fertilizer application, biomass residue and water management, cash and cover crop practices, and grazing management. The methodology is live and current: both version 2.2 and version 2.1 are active and available for use, with corrections and clarifications to v2.2 released in June 2026.

Quantification is the part that separates serious projects from the bogus credits that gave the sector its bad name. VM0042 does not let a developer simply assert a sequestration figure. It offers three principal routes : a measure-and-model approach that combines soil sampling with calibrated process-based models such as RothC, CENTURY, and DNDC; a measure-and-re-measure approach relying on repeated field sampling and laboratory analysis; and a default emission factors approach using IPCC-derived coefficients, with baselines set through either static historical land-use data or dynamic approaches updated with remote sensing and surveys.

The direction of travel is toward more rigor. Verra opened a public consultation in early 2026 on a major revision strengthening requirements for soil organic carbon modeling and repeated measurements, alongside a new Soil Sampling and Analysis Handbook detailing sampling design, sample size determination, and laboratory procedures.

The credibility seal that buyers now look for is the Integrity Council’s Core Carbon Principles label. In late 2025 the ICVCM approved its first two sustainable agriculture methodologies for the CCP label : the Climate Action Reserve’s U.S. Soil Enrichment Protocol and Verra’s VM0042 version 2.2. A project built today under VM0042 v2.2 is therefore building toward credits that can carry the label institutional buyers increasingly treat as a precondition. Corporate procurement guidance now openly advises buyers to aim for majority CCP-aligned portfolios by 2027 and full alignment by 2030.

We treat the carbon lifecycle like a physical commodity

The way we underwrite this is closer to physical commodity trade finance than to anything resembling a software cap table, and that framing is deliberate. A verified carbon credit moves through a lifecycle that maps almost one-for-one onto a physical commodity: there is an upstream production phase that consumes capital long before anything saleable exists, a processing-and-certification phase where the raw output is quantified, verified and made fungible, and finally a midstream-to-trading phase where a standardized, registry-held unit is delivered against contract.

Production, offtake, working capital, delivery risk and quality specification belong in the same vocabulary a metals or agri trader uses every day, because the underlying problem is the same one.

That is also why the financing logic carries over cleanly. Anyone who has financed a pre-export commodity flow already understands the core structure: capital goes in upstream against a credible forecast of future production, secured by a forward offtake at an agreed price. Pre-issuance financing of carbon credits is pre-export finance by another name, and a carbon stream is a metals stream pointed at a different ledger.

This is the part we are actively building. We are engaging with physical commodity traders, counterparties who already understand why upstream production needs upfront capital, and who are comfortable taking forward positions against future delivery, to structure offtake for credits that have not yet been issued. A trader who has spent a career advancing capital against a copper cargo or a grain harvest that will not exist for eighteen months does not need the economics of pre-issuance carbon explained to them. They need a project whose forecast output is credible enough to contract against.

Where this leaves a prospective developer or buyer

If you are a corporate buyer assembling a removals portfolio that has to withstand scrutiny against a net zero claim, the case for soil organic carbon from a credible host geography is straightforward: it is a genuine removal, it carries real agricultural co-benefits, and under the current VM0042 and ICVCM framework it can be sourced with a defensible integrity story into a market where CCP-grade supply is structurally scarce and commands a measurable premium.

If you are a project developer sitting on access to degraded Kazakh farmland and a pipeline of willing farmers, the constraint is rarely the carbon. It is the capital to bridge the years between practice change and first issuance, and the structuring expertise to raise it without giving away the project.

That bridge, pre-issuance and stream financing structured around a project built to survive due diligence, is the work we do. We are happy to look at a project at the feasibility stage and tell you honestly whether it is financeable and on what terms.