Which Industries Are Most Involved in the Voluntary Carbon Market?

Programs like the Science Based Targets Initiative and the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Markets are underscoring the importance of transparency in the VCM from both a project and corporate perspective.

We have standardized retirement data to make it easier to understand what corporates are offsetting; since then, we have categorized the companies by sector, to make it easy to draw comparisons among firms.

The top 3 sectors by the number of companies are energy (19.5%), financial services (17.4%) and professional services (12.8%).

We then sorted the buyers categories by the number of retired credits. The top three sectors buyers retire credits from are airlines, consumer goods, and consumer services. They account for more than 101.7m tCO2e retired in the voluntary carbon market.

We also ranked the top 10 offsetting buyers, based on the tCO2 retired in the past 12 years. The top three retiring companies are Delta, Shell and EasyJet which have retired over 43,000,000 tCO2 over the past 12 years. The number of credits retired by these firms going forward will likely decrease, as EasyJet has announced that it will soon stop purchasing carbon offsets and focus on technologies such as hydrogen-powered jet engines and direct air capture.

For more data and information on the voluntary carbon markets, check out our website or reach out to hello@alliedoffsets.com.