Core Carbon Principles and Carbon Credit Ratings: complementary tools for a maturing market

The Core Carbon Principles (CCPs) and carbon credit ratings play different but complementary roles in strengthening integrity, confidence and transparency in carbon markets.

The CCPs establish a common, independent threshold for carbon credit quality to ratchet up ambition at a systemic level. The Integrity Council assesses whether the rules, governance structures and methodologies used to generate credits meet science-based requirements for high-integrity carbon credits. In doing so, the CCPs drive systemic improvements across the market by raising the quality of program governance and methodologies, and thus, all the projects that use them.

Ratings agencies assess quality at a project-level pre- and post-issuance. While there are differences in analytical approach, carbon ratings typically focus on additionality, carbon accounting, and permanence risks and they publish their own ratings methodologies.

Many agencies also include beyond carbon analysis, delivery risk, and other specific project characteristics that may be relevant to buyer preferences and procurement decisions. Ratings agencies include companies like BeZero Carbon, Calyx Global, MSCI, and Sylvera, and they typically use an eight-point scale of AAA-D to denote a range of outcomes, rather than a binary threshold.

According to Sylvera’s online platform, across every year analysed from 2021 to 2026, CCP-labelled projects consistently achieve higher independent ratings than non-CCP projects. In 2026, 76% of CCP projects were rated BBB or above, compared with just 13% of non-CCP projects, highlighting the strong alignment between CCP eligibility and higher-quality project performance. Together, CCPs and ratings create robust supply-side integrity.

The CCPs set an ex-ante threshold: “Does this crediting approach meet a robust, science-based threshold for high integrity?”

Ratings can then help answer a comparative ex-post question: “Which CCP-eligible projects best align with a buyer’s objectives and risk appetite?”

This layered approach is common in mature financial and commodity markets, where baseline regulatory or governance standards coexist with additional market analysis, ratings and research.

The CCPs create the common integrity foundation for the market. Ratings and other analytical tools can then help buyers make more tailored procurement decisions within the competitive market ecosystem.
The combination of CCPs and ratings is driving market behaviour.

Multiple analyses show that buyers are increasingly prioritising both CCP-labelled credits and higher-rated credits, reflecting wider convergence around integrity and quality in the market.

The market’s reaction to project-level ratings and the CCP label has been strong, with several analyses pointing to their respective roles in spurring a broader “flight to quality” across the market.

Since mid-2024, the MSCI Global CCP Carbon Credit Price Index has maintained an average 19% premium to the MSCI Global Carbon Credit Price Index, which tracks pricing for the whole carbon credit market. The MSCI data showed that the proportion of overall market trading activity accounted for by projects issuing CCP-labelled credits more than doubled when comparing to activity in the period before labels were applied against the period after labels were applied. Similarly, BeZero data shows that ratings are also driving price. In 2025, the average price premium by rating notch for the Afforestation, Reforestation & Restoration credits was as high as 87%.

CCP-labels and ratings are also impacting retirements. MSCI data shows that retirements of credits from CCP-Approved methodologies grew by more than 100% in 2025, while retirements of credits from rejected methodologies fell significantly. Meanwhile, BeZero data shows that, since 2022, the share of retirements rated ‘A’ or higher has more than doubled, while ‘C’/‘D’-rated retirements have almost halved.

There are also growing signs that supply-side integrity initiatives, such as the CCPs and ratings, are becoming a baseline requirement for many governments, buyers, investors and financial institutions participating in the market. Market participants increasingly view CCP-Approval as an important initial screen when making investment and procurement decisions because it provides a common, independent integrity threshold across methodologies and programs.

Several market participants have publicly indicated they are prioritising or exclusively financing projects aligned with CCP-Approved methodologies, reflecting the growing role of the CCP label as core market infrastructure for high-integrity carbon markets.

———————————————

Note

Unless otherwise indicated, all ratings-related statistics and figures referenced in this blog have been extracted from the respective rating agencies’ platforms, databases, or publications and can be accessed through those sources. The ICVCM has compiled these data for informational purposes only.