This flagship report examines past trends and possible futures for the demand and supply balance of the Voluntary Carbon Market (VCM). We outline scenarios based on different IC-VCM outcomes, Article 6 implementations, and corporate demand levels.

Building out this Voluntary Carbon Market forecast note and its scenarios was probably the most challenging forecast this firm has undertaken. This is because most of the markets framework is still in total flux / ongoing development. For the same reason, it is also one of our most valuable forecasts, in bringing grounded insight to a highly conflicted and confused domain.

With so many differing definitions and decision-sets in demand and supply, we have incredible variation in potential outcomes from a forecasting perspective. Consequently, this report\’s 2030 results vary between a (highly unlikely) 1.1 billion tons of market shortage, through to 1.3 billion tons of market surplus – depending on scenario.