ACR Earns Program-Level Core Carbon Principle (CCP) Approval from the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM)

ACR is pleased to announce that the Governing Board of the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM) has approved ACR at the program level as “Core Carbon Principles (CCP) Eligible.”

This announcement represents the first step in the ICVCM process. It means that ACR will be able to label CCP-Approved carbon credits from CCP-Approved Categories of carbon credits as those approvals are earned in the next step of assessment.

“We appreciate this recognition of the rigor of our program and will continue to engage constructively with ICVCM to defend best practices in a world that is demanding not only carbon market integrity, but also inclusivity and urgency,” said Mary Grady, ACR’s Executive Director. “ACR’s mission is to create confidence in the integrity of carbon markets; to that end, ICVCM offers a pathway to harmonize standards around a global benchmark of quality. ACR will continue to bring our expertise and experience to the table by participating on the governing board and expert working groups.”

Since its founding in 1996 as the world’s first private greenhouse gas registry, ACR has innovated and operationalized key elements of carbon credit quality assurance, including scientific peer-reviewed accounting methodologies and well-accepted approaches to address additionality, leakage, and reversal risk mitigation; oversight of independent third-party verification; and operation of a transparent registry for the issuance and tracking of serialized credits.

ACR’s approach to program quality has earned approval to issue credits for use in regulated carbon markets, including the State of California’s Cap-and-Trade Program, the International Civil Aviation Organization’s (ICAO) Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA), the State of Washington’s Cap-and-Invest Program, and towards compliance with Singapore’s Carbon Pricing Act.

To become approved as meeting CCP requirements, ACR submitted an extensive application to ICVCM for assessment. We provided evidence of being a CORSIA Eligible Emissions Unit Program, in addition to meeting the CCP’s additional criteria around effective governance, credit tracking, transparency, and robust, independent third-party validation and verification.

While ACR views this as an important step forward, we remain focused on earning CCP-Approved labels for our portfolio of carbon credits, which includes emission reductions and removals from industrial and nature-based solutions. In addition, ACR’s sister organization – the Architecture for REDD+ Transactions (ART) – looks forward to earning program-level and category-level approval from ICVCM. Ultimately, ACR expects that other leading carbon crediting programs will earn ICVCM approval, to provide confidence to buyers in credit quality and allow finance to flow to impactful climate solutions to support the goals of the Paris Agreement. The urgency of climate change demands nothing less.

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