By Amin June 19, 2026

The carbon market became a buyer's market. Here's how to keep finding buyers.

Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

Open any 2026 market review and you'll read that the voluntary carbon market is a buyer's market. The numbers back it up at first glance. Issuance has run at 1.54 tonnes for every tonne retired over the last five quarters. Retirements fell to 168 million tonnes in 2025, down 4.5%. Headline prices sit around $6 a tonne. Plenty of supply, soft prices, cautious buyers.

For the credits that serious buyers actually want, the picture inverts. High-rated removals have been in deficit for three years running. The premium for quality has gone from a rounding error to the whole game.

The glut is real. It's just sitting in tonnes nobody is trying to buy.

That gap, between an oversupplied bottom and a starved top, is the most important thing happening in this market. It quietly changed how buyers get found. The developers adapting to it are closing offtakes years out. A lot of strong inventory is sitting unsold for reasons that have nothing to do with how good it is, which is the part worth fixing.

A buyer's market by volume, a seller's market at the top

Look at where the money actually went in 2025. Total market value rose 6% to $1.04 billion even as volume fell. The weighted average price climbed to $6.10. Volume down, value up: that only happens when buyers trade quantity for quality.

Sylvera's rating data shows the split cleanly. Credits rated BBB and above made up 31% of retirements, up from 25% a year earlier. Highly-rated nature-based removals (BBB or better) averaged more than $26 a tonne by late 2025. Lower-rated equivalents sat around $14. Same credit type, nearly double the price, decided entirely by the integrity rating attached to it.

MSCI tracks the same divergence across the whole market. The spread between its "BBB and above" index and its "BB and below" index averaged $5.1 in 2025 and pushed past $7 by year-end, up from $2.9 in 2024. By December a high-quality credit carried roughly a 360% premium over a low-quality one.

So a tonne is no longer a tonne. Which tonne you're holding decides whether you have pricing power or a write-down. The oversupply that makes this a "buyer's market" is concentrated almost entirely in unrated and low-rated credits, the exact inventory that no amount of selling effort moves at a decent price.

If your project sits at the top of the quality curve, you are not in a buyer's market. You are in a deficit, and the buyers know it.

Demand didn't shrink. It went quiet and got picky.

The other half of the "buyer's market" story is that corporates have gone cold on offsets. They've gone quiet, which is a different thing.

Of 75 companies studied between April 2024 and May 2025, only 13% made a public retreat from sustainability commitments. The other 85% held steady or accelerated, often without announcing it. Greenhushing is the trend now: keep buying, stop putting out the press release. More than 12,000 companies have committed to or validated science-based targets through SBTi, including 2,290 with net-zero commitments. The buyers are there. They've stopped advertising.

What changed is the first question a buyer asks. It used to be "how many tonnes and how much." Now it's "can I defend this purchase if a journalist calls." The Guardian's reporting on Verra rainforest credits set the tone, and no sustainability lead wants to be the next case study. So every purchase has to survive scrutiny before it gets approved.

That moves the entire evaluation upstream, to provenance, before anyone talks price. Here's what a serious buyer screens on now:

What they check	What they're protecting against
Third-party rating (BeZero, Sylvera, MSCI, Calyx)	Buying a credit that gets downgraded after the fact
ICVCM CCP label	Lacking a recognized integrity benchmark to point to
Additionality and baseline credibility	Paying for emissions cuts that would have happened anyway
Durability and permanence	Reversals, especially on nature-based storage
MMRV rigor	Overstated tonnage that doesn't hold up to audit
Corresponding adjustments / host-country authorization	Double counting against a national target
Co-benefits (SDG alignment)	A credit that's technically valid but reputationally thin

CCP-labelled credits show what this scrutiny does to price. They command roughly a 25% premium, around 40% of buyers are actively seeking them, and 55% of companies now apply the Core Carbon Principles to assess quality. Only 10% of 2025 issuance carried the label. Demand for the defensible stuff outruns supply, and that's the whole point.

The best buyers are already locking the good supply

While the spot market looks sleepy, the forward market is where the real money moved. Long-term offtake commitments surged to $12.3 billion in 2025, up from $3.95 billion the year before. That's a 3x jump in buyers committing to future delivery, mostly for high-durability removals priced far above spot.

The reason is supply fear, not generosity. Over 80% of high-durability carbon removal capacity is at risk of never getting built without committed offtake, according to Carbon Direct's 2026 market report. Buyers who need durable removals at the end of the decade have figured out that the projects won't exist unless they commit now. So they're signing offtakes in 2025 and 2026 for delivery in 2027 through 2030.

The regulatory clock makes this concrete. SBTi finalized its Corporate Net-Zero Standard V2.0 on June 11, 2026. Under it, large companies are required to buy carbon removals starting in 2035, beginning at 1% of their footprint and rising every year to their net-zero date. New target submissions must align with V2.0 from February 2028. Every SBTi-aligned large company is now on a path to mandated, growing removal purchases, and the smart ones are securing supply before the rush.

For a seller, timing is the whole game. A lot of the high-value demand for your category may already be committed, with budgets and volumes locked through 2030 once an offtake is signed. The window to reach those buyers is open while they're still scoping the program, which is earlier than most outreach tends to start.

Why the old way of finding buyers breaks

The traditional seller motion was broker-led, relationship-led, and volume-led. You issued credits, handed them to a broker or listed them on an exchange, and the broker's relationships moved the inventory to whoever wanted tonnes. Quality was hard to assess, so the broker's knowledge of who-wants-what was the valuable part.

Ratings and labels broke that. When a buyer can pull a BeZero or Sylvera rating and check the CCP label themselves, the broker's information edge thins out. Buyers who care about quality increasingly go straight to developers for the specific supply they want, which is exactly why offtake volume tripled.

The scarce skill flipped. It used to be moving volume. Now it's matching a specific project's attributes to the specific buyers who require exactly those attributes, and reaching them at the right moment in their procurement cycle.

A cheap avoidance credit and an engineered removal are not the same product sold to the same buyer at different prices. They serve different mandates. A company with an SBTi-validated net-zero target and a durable-CDR requirement is a fit for one and a non-fit for the other. Matching the credit to the mandate protects the one thing high-value buyers don't give twice: their attention.

Finding buyers is now a signals problem

The inputs sellers need are public. A buyer's mandate, integrity bar, and timeline all leave a trail. The work is reading it.

Signal	What it tells you	Where to find it
SBTi validated target	Structural future buyer of removals, with a net-zero date that backs out timing	SBTi target dashboard (downloadable)
CDP disclosure	Offset use, ambition trajectory, Scope coverage	CDP questionnaire responses
Prior registry retirements	A proven buyer, plus the exact type, vintage, and rating they bought	Verra / Gold Standard / registry records
Net-zero commitment date	When they need removals and at what ramping volume	Corporate sustainability reports
RFP or offtake announcement	An active buyer currently in-cycle	Press, procurement portals, trade press

The highest-conviction prospect is the intersection of these, not any single one. A company with a validated net-zero target, a history of retiring credits in your category, and a durability mandate that matches your project is worth ten cold approaches to companies that merely have a sustainability page.

Two things follow from this. First, retirement history is the most underused signal in the market. It's revealed preference: a buyer's past retirements tell you their integrity bar and category preference more honestly than any survey. Second, timing beats persistence. Most buyers transact once a year, tied to reporting deadlines, and the high-value ones lock multi-year offtakes well ahead. The win condition is reaching a buyer while they're scoping their program. That means triggering outreach on a signal, a new SBTi validation, a fresh commitment with a near-term date, a published RFP, so the timing follows the buyer's cycle rather than a fixed campaign calendar.

Pipeline is a year-round build, not a season you wait for

The forward market already settled this. If buyers are committing in 2025 for delivery in 2030, the relationships that win those offtakes start a year or two before anyone signs. A buyer you reach this quarter might not transact until next year. That's next year's pipeline starting early, and it only exists if you began the relationship now.

Signals don't wait for a selling season either. A net-zero target gets validated in March, a fresh commitment lands in September, an RFP opens somewhere in between. A push that only runs in Q4 misses most of them. Keeping pipeline healthy for both this year and the next comes down to targeted campaigns running all year, each one triggered by a buyer-side signal and aimed at opening a new relationship before the buyer is ready to buy.

That's a different rhythm than the annual sales sprint most teams run. Fewer big launches, more steady contact with the right accounts at the moment each one moves. The relationships you build through a quiet summer are the deals that close the following spring.

The research is the hard part. Stitching SBTi status, CDP disclosures, registry retirements, and commitment dates into a single per-company view is slow, manual work, and the horizontal prospecting tools don't do it. Apollo and ZoomInfo will tell you a company's headcount and tech stack. They won't tell you it retired 40,000 tonnes of Gold Standard cookstove credits last March and validated a net-zero target in January.

That gap is why we built Emitree. It reads the sustainability-native signals, SBTi commitments, CDP reports, registry retirements, the way an insider would, and surfaces the buyers whose mandate actually matches what you sell. It runs targeted campaigns against them year-round, so a relationship is already warm when a buyer starts scoping and the integrity dossier is in hand before the offtake gets signed. That keeps this year's pipeline full while building the relationships that close next year and the year after.

The sellers who win in 2026 treat finding the right buyer as the hard part of the job. Because in a market this bifurcated, it is.

The credits sorted themselves into winners and losers two years ago. The sellers are sorting now, by who can find the buyer before everyone else does.