Welcome to another week of Shaken Not Burned! 

Carbon markets are intended to be the backbone of climate finance – but they’re often criticised for being opaque, inefficient, and riddled with credibility issues. This week, Giulia talked to Alex Taylor, co-founder at KlimaDAO and Carbonmark, about the messy reality of the voluntary carbon markets, from opaque pricing, questionable credit quality, middlemen capturing most of the value, as well as why so many people doubt the whole system.

KlimaDAO tried to use blockchain to make the market more transparent and efficient by tokenising carbon credits and putting them on-chain, exposing real prices, cutting out intermediaries. That is the sort of move expected to result in more transparency, liquidity, and, crucially, accountability. 

Yet, there are always challenges in new approaches, and the conversation doesn’t dodge the 2022 ‘zombie credits’ controversy: when older and largely inactive credits bridged via Toucan ended up dominating KlimaDAO’s early pools, raising concerns from independent analysts about quality and integrity.

Alex talks candidly about what went wrong, why it happened, and how they’ve redesigned their systems to focus on higher-quality and removal credits. This could be a case study in what it takes to rebuild trust in a market many people already see as flawed, and the role technology can realistically play in cleaning it up.

The real question is: will it deliver? And what does it mean for the future of climate finance if the markets themselves are being rebuilt from the ground up? 

This episode examines the integrity challenges across voluntary carbon markets, why additionality and credit quality matter, and how efforts like KlimaDAO aim to fix long-standing problems.

Reading materials:

• Take our Climate Misinformation Survey

• What are carbon markets and how do they work?

• The Biggest Crypto Effort to End Useless Carbon Offsets Is Backfiring 

• Guardian’s investigation into Verra

• Verra concludes investigation into REDD project, finds 15 million ‘hot air’ credits

• The negligible role of carbon offsetting in corporate climate strategies

• Do carbon markets work? 

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