Last week, we published two conversations that, on the surface, could not have been more diametrically opposed.

The first was with Patrick Greenfield from The Guardian, one of the journalists most closely associated with the voluntary carbon market’s integrity reckoning. Patrick’s reporting, along with that of several peers and researchers, helped put intense public pressure on parts of the market, particularly around REDD+, forestry baselines, over-crediting, and the way some companies were using credits to make claims that went far beyond what the underlying instruments could reasonably support.

The second was with Ed Mitchard, co-founder and Chief Scientist of Space Intelligence, whose work sits at the centre of what the next generation of high-integrity forest carbon will need to become: more data-led, more conservative, more transparent, and more willing to acknowledge uncertainty rather than hide behind false precision.

At first glance, these conversations seem to sit on opposite sides of the debate. One represents criticism. The other represents reconstruction. One looks back at what went wrong. The other looks forward at what must now be built. But the more I reflected on both, the more I realised they were circling the same underlying question: can the carbon market survive the scrutiny that was necessary to improve it?

And, perhaps more importantly, are buyers now using that scrutiny as a convenient excuse to do nothing?

The criticism was real, but the conflation was damaging

Let’s start in the right place. The voluntary carbon market had issues that needed fixing. Some methodologies needed to evolve. Some project categories, particularly REDD+ and cookstoves, needed more scrutiny. Some claims needed to be tightened. The market was not perfect, and pretending otherwise would be intellectually dishonest.

But there is a very big difference between saying the market needed reform and saying the underlying concept was illegitimate.

At the time, much of the buyer activity was centred around carbon neutrality claims. Companies were trying to attach a cost to the emissions associated with products and services — flights, fuel, consumer goods, logistics, events, and the rest. Was the language sometimes too broad? Yes. Did some claims overreach? Yes. Did the system need clearer rules on what could and could not be said? Absolutely.

But the underlying thesis was not absurd. In fact, it was important.

Why shouldn’t a consumer be able to pay for the pollution associated with a product or service? Why shouldn’t a company be able to internalise at least part of the environmental cost of what it sells? Why shouldn’t carbon finance create a bridge between everyday consumption and projects that reduce, avoid, or remove emissions elsewhere?

That was the market signal that mattered. For all its imperfections, the carbon neutral product era showed that people were willing to pay. Companies were willing to experiment. Consumers were willing to participate. Carbon finance was finding a way to put a price on an externality that, in most of the real economy, is still treated as free.

Then came the backlash.

Some of it was deserved. But the backlash did not simply correct the claims architecture. It helped kill the incentive to participate. The message that landed was not ‘make better claims, buy better credits, and be more transparent.’ The message that landed was ‘touch this market and you may become the next headline.’

That is where the pendulum swung too far.

Specific criticisms of specific project types, methodologies, and claims were allowed to metastasise into a broader public indictment of the entire instrument. REDD+ became shorthand for the whole voluntary carbon market. Forestry became shorthand for all nature-based solutions. Cookstove concerns became shorthand for all household and community-based climate interventions. A set of legitimate questions around baselines, additionality, leakage, durability, and claims was simplified into something much cruder: carbon credits do not work.

That was never a serious analysis of the market. It was a narrative collapse.

It was also a classic perfection paradox. Because the instrument was imperfect, the puritanical answer became to reject the instrument altogether. Rather than improve the system, tighten the rules, and preserve the flow of capital, the debate became so moralised and self-righteous that participation itself became suspect.

The result is not a cleaner climate strategy. The result is that many companies have gone quiet, consumers have lost a pathway to contribute, and polluters can continue polluting without even the imperfect cost signal that credits were starting to create.

The bathwater needed changing. The baby did not need to be thrown out with the bathwater.

The market listened

The irony is that the criticism has actually worked.

The market did not simply shrug, circle the wagons, and carry on as before. It changed.

Methodologies have been tightened. Baselines are becoming more conservative. Geospatial data is playing a much larger role. Ratings agencies have added independent scrutiny. Claims guidance has become stricter. Buyer due diligence has become significantly more sophisticated. Coalitions are forming to centralise diligence, pool demand, and send clearer signals to high-quality projects.

None of this means the market is perfect. It means the market is maturing.

That distinction matters. There is a tendency in climate debates to hold market-based instruments to a standard of perfection that almost nothing else in the real economy is asked to meet. Carbon markets are expected to be scientifically precise, socially just, legally robust, politically resilient, financially scalable, and reputationally risk-free. That is a high bar, and it should be high. But if the standard becomes perfection or nothing, the result will be nothing.

Ed Mitchard’s episode was a useful reminder of what market maturation actually looks like. Space Intelligence is not selling a slogan. It is building the data infrastructure that allows buyers, developers, standards, and coalitions to better assess land cover, forest carbon, durability, deforestation risk, and project performance. This is exactly the type of infrastructure that critics said the market needed. More external data. More independent verification. Better monitoring. Less reliance on self-referential assumptions. A clearer understanding of uncertainty.

This is the market responding to criticism not through defensiveness, but through better systems.

And yet, despite those reforms, the demand side remains fragile. The market has spent the past several years building the integrity frameworks that critics said was missing.

Yet many buyers are still sitting on the sidelines, unwilling to engage publicly, unwilling to make long-term commitments, and unwilling to support even the higher-integrity supply that the market is now working so hard to build.

Which raises an uncomfortable question. Was the issue really integrity? Or has the lack of (maximum) integrity now become a convenient excuse?

The (in)convenient excuse

Buyers are scared. That much is clear.

They are scared of being accused of greenwashing. Scared of headlines. Scared of NGOs. Scared of plaintiff lawyers. Scared of internal reputational risk. Scared that even a good-faith purchase of carbon credits, from a credible project, under a more conservative methodology, with careful claims language, could still be framed as a scandal.

Some of that caution is understandable. Companies should be careful. They should not make lazy claims. They should not suggest that buying credits somehow absolves them from the harder work of decarbonising their own operations and value chains. They should not use credits as a cheap substitute for transition. The market got that wrong in the past, and a correction was necessary, just that things went too far.

This caution has become convenient.

Because the easiest thing for a company to do now is nothing. Do not buy credits. Do not make claims. Do not fund projects. Do not speak publicly. Do not expose yourself. Keep emitting, keep delaying, keep hiding behind complexity, and let the sustainability team explain internally that the reputational risk of participation is too high.

That may be a rational communications strategy. But, it is not a climate strategy.

We have created a perverse incentive structure where participation is risky, but inaction is comfortable. A company that buys credits, even carefully, can be criticised for imperfection. A company that buys nothing can often avoid the conversation entirely. That cannot be the outcome we accept.

The fear of greenwashing is real, but it has also become an (in)convenient excuse. Not because greenwashing does not matter. It does. Not because buyers should get a free pass. They should not. But because the fear of saying the wrong thing, or backing the wrong project, or appearing on the wrong side of a future headline, has become a reason for many companies to avoid doing anything meaningful at all.

And doing nothing is not neutral. It has consequences.

Carbon finance does not exist without demand

This is the part of the debate that is often discussed in abstract terms but felt very concretely on the ground. Carbon projects need capital. Developers need to secure land rights, engage communities, build nurseries, restore ecosystems, protect forests, monitor outcomes, validate projects, verify credits, and maintain operations over decades. These projects are not built on goodwill alone. They are built because investors, developers, communities, and buyers believe there will be a functioning market at the other end.

Without offtakes, investors cannot underwrite projects. Without demand, developers cannot finance supply. Without credits, there is no revenue model. Without revenue, the climate and community benefits do not materialise.

This is where Patrick’s own observations are important. His reporting has highlighted the difficulties faced by projects and communities when market demand weakens. Funding that was expected to support long-term conservation and community infrastructure becomes less certain. Projects that were designed to operate over decades are suddenly exposed to media cycles, reputational cycles, methodology changes, and buyer retreat.

That does not mean every project deserved funding. It does not mean every credit was high quality. It does not mean the old system should be defended. But it does mean that a better market still needs buyers.

If demand disappears, the financing model collapses. And when the financing model collapses, projects do not magically continue at the same scale. Communities receive less. Conservation becomes harder. Restoration slows. Developers struggle. The people doing the work on the ground are left carrying the consequences of a market that buyers were too afraid to support.

This is especially important in nature-based markets, where the timelines are long and the financing challenge is brutal. A restoration project can take years before credits are issued. A forest conservation project needs confidence that support will not disappear at the first sign of reputational turbulence. Investors need long-term offtake signals. Developers need predictable demand. Communities need to know that promises made in year one will still mean something in year ten.

So yes, the market needed higher integrity. But integrity without demand is not a functioning market. It is an autopsy.

Doing nothing is not better than doing something

This is where the debate has become absurd. Some companies now seem to believe that buying no credits is safer, cleaner, and more defensible than buying imperfect credits. From a reputational perspective, perhaps that is true. From a climate perspective, it is nonsense.

If emissions continue to rise (let's face it very few companies are bending the curve down), then avoiding carbon credits does not reduce atmospheric carbon. It does not fund mitigation. It does not protect forests. It does not restore ecosystems. It does not support communities. It does not compensate for residual emissions. It does not remove carbon from the atmosphere. It simply avoids reputational exposure.

That is not leadership. That is cowardice dressed up as prudence.

Of course companies should reduce their own emissions first. Of course credits should not be used as a substitute for decarbonisation. Of course claims need to be honest, proportionate, and grounded in reality. But the idea that doing nothing is somehow morally superior to participating in a reformed, higher-integrity carbon market is perverse.

Not every credit is a solution. But doing nothing is not a strategy.

This matters even more now because the world is not moving in a straight line toward lower emissions. AI infrastructure is driving enormous new energy demand. Heavy industry remains hard to abate. Aviation, shipping, cement, steel, chemicals, and oil and gas still face real decarbonisation constraints. In many cases, emissions are not falling, period. In most cases, they are actually climbing.

So what happens when companies continue to emit, miss their targets, delay their transition plans, and then also refuse to support credible climate finance beyond their own value chains? Are we really prepared to say that is better? Are we really prepared to accept that silence is safer than action? Are we really prepared to build a system where the companies most exposed to criticism are the ones that tried to participate?

Because if that is the incentive structure, then we have built something deeply perverse.

The media now has a harder question to ask

The media was right to scrutinise exaggerated claims. It was right to ask whether projects were delivering what they promised. It was right to challenge buyers that used credits as a cheap shortcut to carbon neutrality. That scrutiny helped force reform, and the market is stronger for it.

But now the media needs to apply the same scrutiny in the other direction.

What happens when companies that made bold climate commitments quietly walk them back? What happens when large emitters continue to emit, or even increase emissions, while contributing nothing meaningful to mitigation beyond their own value chains? What happens when the fear of greenwashing becomes the excuse for not funding anything at all?

Will those companies face the same scrutiny? Will the front pages care as much about inaction as they did about imperfect action? Will the same energy be applied to companies that abandon climate finance as was applied to companies that bought credits and made poor claims?

Because if the only companies punished are the ones that tried to participate, while the companies that retreat into silence face no consequences, then the incentive structure is broken.

The next scandal may not be who bought imperfect credits. It may be who used imperfection as an excuse to buy nothing.

The market is ready for renaissance

The voluntary carbon market is not dead. It is more sober, more technical, more scrutinised, less naive, and in many ways stronger than it has ever been.

That does not mean every credit is high quality. It does not mean every claim is credible. It does not mean the market gets a free pass. The market still needs scrutiny. It still needs challenge. It still needs critics. But the conversation needs to mature.

We cannot keep re-litigating the failures of the last cycle while ignoring the reforms of this one. We cannot demand perfect instruments in an imperfect world and then pretend that non-participation is climate leadership. And we cannot allow fear of greenwashing to become the convenient excuse that lets buyers walk away from climate finance altogether.

The market was criticised into reform. Now buyers need to be criticised into action.

Because the atmosphere does not care whether emissions were left uncompensated for legal, reputational, or communications reasons. Forests do not care that a sustainability team was worried about a headline. Communities do not get funded by corporate caution.

If buying bad credits deserved scrutiny, then so does emitting, and doing nothing to stop it, including buying imperfect carbon credits.