BeZero Carbon and OxCarbon Collaborate to Boost Voluntary Carbon Market Transparency and Scale Climate Investment

London-based global carbon ratings agency BeZero Carbon and OxCarbon, a non-profit spinout of the University of Oxford, have today announced a collaboration to increase transparency in the Voluntary Carbon Market.

OxCarbon’s mission is to promote innovation in climate impact projects, supported by transparency and scientific best-practice. BeZero’s Carbon is the world’s largest provider of ratings-based risk analysis in the Voluntary Carbon Market, providing market participants with the information they need to make better Net Zero decisions.

Collaborating to Increase Transparency in Voluntary Carbon Market

Thanks to this collaboration, OxCarbon will work with carbon credit project developers, including community-based projects and those supporting rural organisations, to engage with BeZero Carbon during their design phase. This will help developers understand the information they need to publicly disclose so BeZero Carbon can provide ratings for market participants. Crucially, this will not influence the rating BeZero Carbon provides, which will be subject to its usual rigorous and independent analysis.

Ensuring Integrity and Confidence in Carbon Projects through Data-driven Approaches

Tommy Ricketts, CEO of BeZero Carbon said: “BeZero is proud to collaborate with OxCarbon on building data disclosure requirements into projects at the design phase. BeZero Carbon Ratings uniquely require projects to publicly disclose sufficient information to justify their carbon claims. Working with OxCarbon to ensure this is an essential building block for ensuring the integrity in the credits can be fairly assessed by investors, intermediaries, and end buyers alike. The analytical expertise of BeZero, combined with the transparent and scientific best practice approaches developed by OxCarbon, will help boost confidence for scaling of financial investment into the high-quality carbon projects we need to fight the climate crisis.”

Stephen Lezak, Carbon Accounting Lead at OxCarbon, said: “The huge climate challenge ahead of us will require huge climate impact investment. In order to facilitate this, data-driven and scientific approaches that can assess climate impact at scale are essential. Full transparency enforces integrity by allowing independent expert assessment by companies such as BeZero – which in turn can unlock investment capital.”