Sovereign CDR deals, shared standards 

For more than a decade, the voluntary carbon market has been building something genuinely useful. A shared infrastructure – one comprised of common carbon dioxide removal (CDR) methodologies that define what a tonne of removal actually is; independent registries that track issuance and retirement transparently and a set of reference points that lets a buyer in one country trust a project in another without negotiating the rules from scratch. 

Article 6.2 of the Paris Agreement now opens a second, sovereign channel for that same climate value to move across borders. Countries can cooperate directly, transferring mitigation outcomes bilaterally and counting them toward their national targets. This is a real opportunity. But the fragmented way these markets are being assembled – deal by deal, often from a blank page – risks delaying climate action for years. 

A fast-growing patchwork 

The momentum is unmistakable. Governments have now formalised more than a hundred cooperative arrangements under Article 6, involving over sixty countries. Yet the headline number flatters the reality. The large majority are memoranda of understanding and framework declarations. Only a small share are binding agreements with authorised transfers that are tracked end to end. 

In other words, the intent is everywhere, but the operational plumbing is being laid one deal at a time. What is missing is the consistency that lets them connect into a single cross-border system. That is where a globally recognised standard comes in.  

The cost of starting from a blank slate 

A bilateral arrangement has many moving parts, and several of them are inherently sovereign: how authorisation works, how the host accounts for the transfer against its own NDC, how benefits are shared, what each side keeps and what it lets go.  

A common methodology will not make those political questions disappear, and it should not as they belong to governments. But the quantification layer: how a tonne of removal is defined, measured, and verified, is one of the topics on the table, and a significant one. It is the most technically demanding part of the deal; it carries environmental and social safeguards, biomass sustainability, and permanence inside it; and when it is negotiated from scratch, it gets reinvented in every single agreement. 

Two consequences follow. The first is time. Negotiating durable carbon removal terms from first principles can take years, and that delay translates directly into climate action that does not happen. The second is quality. A deliverable hammered out bilaterally, under deadline pressure, by negotiators balancing many competing priorities, is unlikely to be as clearly defined or as robust as one anchored to a globally accepted methodology that has already been tested, consulted on, and benchmarked. Starting from a blank slate does not just cost time – it tends to produce a weaker definition of what was actually agreed. And because negotiating capacity is finite, every month spent re-deriving quantification rules is a month not spent on the sovereign questions that genuinely require it. 

A standard as a common reference 

This is where internationally recognised standards earn their place. A standard benchmarked against the integrity criteria the market already trusts – the ICVCM Core Carbon Principles, CORSIA eligibility – gives both governments a shared definition of what a tonne is and what was promised. Buyers can reuse due diligence they have already done rather than vetting each new national practice from zero. The host side plugs into requirements that global buyers already accept. 

It also narrows the scope of any future disagreement. A standard does not judge the contract between two governments – delivery schedules, price, commercial terms and treaty matters that sit with the parties. What it can do is confirm, independently, that the requirements set out in the methodology were actually fulfilled: that the removal was quantified, monitored, and verified as specified. That is a narrower role than settling a dispute, but a useful one. It takes the question of whether the underlying tonnes were real and met the agreed quality bar off the table, and lets the parties resolve the genuinely contractual questions on top of a verified foundation. 

One project, two buyers, one source of truth 

As the market matures, a growing share of engineered carbon removal projects are likely to serve more than one market at once – selling to voluntary buyers and to some Article 6.2 buyers in parallel. Today most Article 6.2 demand is still for reductions and avoidance rather than engineered removals, and genuinely dual-market removal projects remain relatively few. But the trajectory points that way as removal demand grows on both sides, and the projects already straddling the two are a preview of where much of the market is heading. 

Now imagine asking that supplier to operate under two different methodologies, measure the same activity two different ways, and report into two different systems for the same tonnes. It is operationally punishing, and it is exactly the kind of friction that keeps good projects from scaling. 

There is also a more serious integrity risk hiding in that complexity, and it comes in two forms. The first is double issuance – the same tonne issued twice – which a single registry prevents by being the one authoritative ledger; splitting issuance across two parallel, loosely connected systems reopens exactly that gap. The second, and the one Article 6 is most concerned with, is double counting: a tonne claimed by the host country toward its own NDC and by the buyer at the same time. That is resolved by the corresponding adjustment, not by registry uniqueness – but the adjustment only works if it is recorded against a specific, uniquely identified credit. A single registry that labels each credit for what it is – corresponding adjustment applied, CORSIA-eligible, retired, or available – makes both safeguards legible in one place. One ledger, one set of labels, and no ambiguity about who may claim what. 

Domestic methodologies and export reach 

None of this means countries should not develop their own methodologies. Many will, and for good reason – internal compliance markets need rules tailored to national circumstances, and that sovereignty is entirely legitimate. The European Union has done exactly this in how it approaches its landmark Carbon Removal and Carbon Farming Regulation (CRCF).  

But it comes with a practical limit. A country can use its own methodology and still authorise export under Article 6.2 – nothing in the rules forbids it. The catch is buyer recognition: a foreign buyer, or a compliance scheme such as CORSIA, has to accept that methodology as meeting its quality bar, and a purely domestic standard that no one else has benchmarked is much less likely to clear that hurdle. So exporting a credit is not impossible – it is simply considerably less likely. Credits issued under internationally recognised methods, registered in an international registry, carry that recognition with them, and are therefore far more readily exportable. The difference is not abstract. Exportable credits mean foreign income for the project developer and tax revenue for the host government – the same removal, the same activity, but a larger addressable market and real money flowing into the country rather than circulating only within it. 

Sovereignty without isolation 

The objection at this point is usually about control. Won’t relying on international standards and registries mean governments lose oversight of what leaves their borders? 

It does not have to. Control ultimately rests where it should – in the host country’s own regulation: its authorisation process, its rules on what may be issued and exported, and its national accounting. What international standards and registries add on top of that is visibility. A government can require recognised registries to replicate every relevant transaction into its national registry – either directly, or through a meta-registry, which links and harmonises registry data across jurisdictions. They are technical integration layers, not control levers: they make activity transparent and reconcilable, but the levers of authorisation and oversight stay with the state, where they belong. The result is the best of both – the government keeps full command of corresponding adjustments and NDC accounting through its own rules, while suppliers keep access to global demand. Control and openness are not a trade-off. 

The choice ahead 

The question facing this market is not sovereignty versus standardisation. We can have both – sovereign national oversight running on top of internationally recognised methodologies and transparent registries. 

Fragmentation, by contrast, is a choice, and an expensive one. Its cost is paid in years of delayed investment, in suppliers buried under duplicate reporting, in tonnes that never get traded because the rules were never harmonised, and ultimately in climate action that arrives too late. We spent the best part of a decade building the shared infrastructure that made carbon removal a tradable, trustworthy commodity. As international trade in carbon removal scales, the smart move is to build on that foundation – not to rebuild, country by country, the very friction we worked so hard to remove.