Ninety-five percent. That’s the share of CDR credits issued in the voluntary carbon market in 2025 that came from nature-based approaches — tree planting, soil carbon, mangroves. Only 5% came from high-durability pathways like biochar or BECCS. According to Carbon Direct’s 2026 State of the Voluntary Carbon Market Report, published February 10, this isn’t just a gap. It’s a structural failure.
The numbers paint a grim picture across the board. CDR represents just 5-6% of total VCM retirements. Credit retirements fell 7% in 2025 compared to 2024, landing at 157 Mt total. Corporate climate commitments surged 227% — and the market still shrank. Five consecutive years of stagnation. The VCM isn’t growing into its potential. It’s treading water while the planet warms.
The durability problem is the real crisis. Nature-based CDR stores carbon for decades, maybe a century if you’re lucky and nothing burns down. (Things are burning down.) High-durability removal — biochar lasting 500+ years, mineralization lasting millennia, geological storage lasting forever — accounts for a sliver of the market. And over 80% of existing high-durability CDR capacity is at risk of going offline without additional offtake agreements.
Read that again: we’ve built the hard-tech CDR capacity, and it might shut down because nobody’s buying.
Less than 10% of CDR projects meet Carbon Direct’s own quality threshold. Superpollutant credits — methane destruction, HFC elimination — now make up 20% of all VCM issuances, further diluting actual removal. The market is optimizing for cheapness and volume, not for the thing it’s supposed to do: permanently removing CO₂ from the atmosphere.
The Big Tech exception is instructive. Microsoft, Google, Stripe, and others are buying permanent removal through forward contracts — committing to purchase from Climeworks, Heirloom, and others years in advance. These contracts are building the high-durability supply chain. But they exist entirely outside the spot market. The VCM proper hasn’t caught up, and most corporate buyers still reach for the cheapest credit available.
This creates a two-tier market. Tech giants with science-based procurement teams buy the real stuff through bespoke contracts. Everyone else buys nature-based credits on the open market and calls it a climate strategy. The spot market prices in convenience and cost, not permanence. The forward contract market prices in physics.
What breaks the stalemate? Regulation might. The EU’s upcoming carbon removal certification framework will distinguish durability tiers. Buyer alliances like Frontier are pulling demand forward. And the early movers writing those forward contracts today are effectively setting the quality standards everyone else will eventually follow.
But “eventually” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Right now, 80% of high-durability capacity is staring down the barrel. The VCM had five years to figure this out and chose not to. The clock is running.