Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all.
Why this matters now
Germany’s biggest listed companies are buying carbon credits at industrial scale, but if you try to figure out what they bought, most disclosures fall apart in your hands. A fresh audit by Senken and Sylvera of the DAX40 found that the majority of firms publish no project name, no vintage, no registry, and no pathway. That is the gap between a “net zero” press release and something an auditor can actually verify. And it lands just as Brussels is fighting over whether international credits belong inside the EU’s 2040 climate target at all.
What is it?
A disclosure audit. Senken (a credit marketplace) and Sylvera (a credit ratings firm) examined the sustainability reports of Germany’s 40 largest listed companies to see how much they reveal about the carbon credits they retire. The interesting variables are simple: which project, which vintage year, which registry issued the credit, and which pathway, meaning is it an avoidance credit (paying someone not to emit) or a removal credit (pulling CO2 out of the air and storing it). Senken and Sylvera found major gaps across all four.
Who’s involved?
DAX40 corporate buyers on one side. Ratings firms, registries, and the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM) on the other, trying to label supply quality. And increasingly the European Commission and European banks, who are pressing for tighter rules on international credit use inside the 2040 target precisely because they don’t trust what corporates report.
What just happened?
The Senken/Sylvera audit is the freshest evidence that supply-side integrity work is outrunning buyer-side honesty. ICVCM can stamp a methodology with its Core Carbon Principles label, as it did recently for the Global Carbon Council, but that stamp does nothing if buyers refuse to say which credits they actually retired.
Steel-manning the critique
The critic’s case is strong. If a DAX40 firm retires methane-avoidance credits and calls the result “CO2 neutralization,” the chemistry does not cooperate. As Zeke Hausfather (@hausfath.bsky.social) put it, “Claiming to neutralize CO2 emissions with methane (or other SLCP) mitigation is problematic. It trades off short-term cooling for long-term warming in a way that is inconsistent with our targets of long-term stabilization.” Without pathway disclosure, a sustainability report can hide that swap entirely. Robert Höglund argues the legacy voluntary market is already collapsing under exactly this kind of opacity plus chronic oversupply, and his follow-up explains why removals and avoidance are not interchangeable in practice.
The honest counterweight: some firms genuinely buy high-integrity durable removals, including the kind of enhanced weathering credits Mombak recently generated, and current disclosure norms hide those purchases too. Opacity is bad for the good actors.
Open questions to track
- Will the EU’s 2040 framework mandate line-item disclosure of pathway, vintage, and registry?
- Will SBTi force a removal-vs-avoidance split in corporate net-zero accounting?
- Do any DAX40 firms voluntarily upgrade disclosure before regulators arrive?
- Does the price premium for durable removals widen once buyer-side data is forced into the open?
Further reading
- Carbon Herald on the Senken/Sylvera audit
- Marginal Carbon: the end of high hopes for the traditional VCM
- Marginal Carbon: why reduction credits aren’t as good as removals in practice
Citations
- Carbon Herald — Senken and Sylvera found major gaps across all four
- Carbon Herald — tighter rules on international credit use inside the 2040 target
- Carbon Herald — the Global Carbon Council
- Bluesky — @hausfath.bsky.social — Bluesky post
- Substack (marginalcarbon) — legacy voluntary market is already collapsing — Substack post
- Substack (marginalcarbon) — removals and avoidance are not interchangeable in practice — Substack post