As global carbon markets evolve rapidly in 2025 — especially under the spotlight of COP30 in Belém, Brazil — the debate over carbon avoidance vs carbon removal is turning less academic and more existential. For project developers, investors, and businesses aiming for legitimate climate action, the stakes are high.
The central question is shifting from: “Can we offset our emissions?” to: “Can we prove real, durable climate impact?”
What’s Happening Across Markets — VCM & Compliance Trends
The voluntary carbon market (VCM) has gone through a bruising period. Years of criticism over greenwashing, weak baselines, and cheap, low-integrity offsets have pushed the system into what many now call a quality reset.
Key trends:
- After a steep decline in 2023–2024, market data for 2025 shows that credit retirements are rising again, but with a crucial difference: buyers are shifting away from generic, low-cost offsets toward high-integrity, removal-focused and rigorously verified nature-based credits. The Guardian+1
- Analysts project that carbon-credit supply could increase 20- to 35-fold by 2050, driven not by “any credit at any price”, but by methodologies that can withstand scientific and public scrutiny, including removal, mixed nature-based solutions, and tech-enabled capture. Carbon Brief
- The market is visibly sorting itself: low-quality avoidance projects are being marked down or abandoned, while projects that deliver verifiable climate outcomes are attracting premium buyers and long-term offtake contracts. The Guardian
Bottom line: The VCM is moving from a volume game to a quality game — and in that game, durable carbon removal is emerging as the core asset.
COP30 & The Compliance Market — The Global Regulatory Context
COP30 in Belém has reinforced three messages for carbon markets:
- Credibility is non-negotiable. Negotiators and observers emphasized that carbon markets must support climate goals, not just accounting tricks.
- Interoperability matters. Voluntary and compliance markets need coherent rules, particularly under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, so that one country’s credit is not another country’s double-counted emission. The Guardian+1
- Durable removals are central, not optional. Policy discussions have highlighted that long-term climate stability requires permanent or highly durable carbon storage, not just short-lived projects that can reverse in a few years. The Guardian+1
Even with political headwinds — disagreements over fossil fuel phase-out language, geopolitical tensions, and uneven climate finance — many countries have reaffirmed their intention to scale high-integrity carbon projects and tighten rules around claims and accounting. The Guardian+1
Implication for compliance markets: Regulators are increasingly recognizing that carbon removal, not just avoidance, will be essential to achieving net-zero targets. Only credits that are verifiable, durable, and transparently accounted for will earn a lasting place in regulated markets.
Avoidance vs Removal — The Logic That Matters
We can think of carbon avoidance and carbon removal as performing two different jobs in the climate system:
Carbon avoidance → Prevents emissions that would have happened in the future. → Examples: renewable energy, energy efficiency, methane capture, improved cookstoves. → Climate role: slows the rate of warming.
Carbon removal (CDR) → Takes existing CO₂ out of the atmosphere and stores it for the long term. → Examples: biochar, direct air capture (DAC), BECCS, enhanced weathering, durable biomass storage. → Climate role: reduces the stock of atmospheric CO₂.
We need both, but they are not interchangeable:
- Avoidance = short-term defence
- Removal = long-term repair
Even if emissions were cut to zero tomorrow, the legacy CO₂ already in the atmosphere would keep driving warming for decades. That is why IPCC scenarios that hold warming to 1.5–2 °C all require significant carbon removal alongside rapid mitigation. Wikipedia+1
In short: Avoidance slows the crisis. Removal solves the core problem.
Guardian and Reuters Investigations — How Avoidance Lost Credibility
The credibility crisis around avoidance didn’t emerge from theory — it came from real-world failures that made headlines.
1. “Phantom credits” in rainforest offsets (Guardian 2023)
In early 2023, a nine-month investigation by The Guardian, Die Zeit, and Source Material found that more than 90% of rainforest carbon offsets certified by Verra, one of the largest global standards, were likely “phantom credits” — i.e. they did not represent real, additional carbon reductions. The Guardian+1
Key findings:
- Many avoided-deforestation projects dramatically overstated how much deforestation would have happened without the project, inflating the number of credits they could sell.
- Some forests were likely never at serious risk at the claimed scale, meaning buyers paid for protection that would have happened anyway.
- Major corporations — including household global brands — used these credits to claim “carbon neutrality,” even though the underlying climate benefit was doubtful.
This investigation shook confidence in forest-based avoidance at a structural level. It suggested that the problem wasn’t just a few bad actors, but methodologies that allowed abuse and over-crediting by design.
2. “There is no money”: market collapse and forests at risk (Guardian 2025)
By November 2025, The Guardian returned to the story — this time documenting the human and ecological consequences of the market’s collapse. The Guardian+1
Highlights:
- Projects like the Kasigau Corridor in Kenya — once promoted as model forest-offset schemes and supported by major companies like Netflix and Shell — suddenly faced a collapse in carbon revenue after confidence in Verra-type forest credits plummeted.
- Communities that had received tens of millions of dollars over the years for forest protection and local development saw that income dry up almost overnight.
- Without continued funding, there is a real risk that people will return to deforestation and charcoal production simply to survive.
In other words: when the credibility of avoidance credits evaporated, so did the money — and the forest protection they were supposed to finance.
3. Systemic flaws and “carbon cowboys”
Other investigations and analyses deepened the picture:
- Reviews found that many offset schemes — across forestry, cookstoves, and renewables — suffered from structural problems, making genuine emission reductions hard to prove at scale. The Guardian+1
- In the Brazilian Amazon, a Reuters investigation showed how illegal loggers and land grabbers were able to profit from conservation projects registered with major carbon standards, even while they continued deforestation and timber fraud. Reuters+1
The lesson is clear:
“Avoided deforestation” credits do not always avoid deforestation — and sometimes they merely paper over continued harm.
These cases exposed avoidance credits as:
- Fragile, because they depend on hypothetical “what if” scenarios
- Vulnerable, because governance failures can erase claimed climate benefits
- Risky, because when integrity is questioned, funding can disappear, harming both climate and communities
As a result, many corporates and investors are now re-evaluating avoidance-based strategies and pivoting towards credits backed by measurable, permanent carbon removal.
What These Failures Tell Us — And Why Removal Is Gaining Ground
From these investigations and market responses, three conclusions stand out:
- Avoidance credits are structurally fragile. They often hinge on counterfactuals (“what would have happened”) that are difficult to prove and easy to manipulate.
- Permanence and verifiability matter. Carbon removal — such as biochar, DAC, or durable mineralization — is easier to track in terms of tons removed and years stored. Once CO₂ is captured and placed in a long-term sink, the climate benefit is tangible and auditable, not hypothetical.
- Market and investor trust is shifting. As scandals accumulate, the appetite for opaque avoidance credits declines. Buyers are increasingly seeking high-integrity, removal-based credits with clear MRV (measurement, reporting, verification) and robust governance.
Avoidance still has a role, especially in sectors where immediate reductions are possible and necessary. But the center of gravity in climate finance is moving toward removal-centric portfolios.
What This Means in Practice (General, and for Countries Like Bangladesh)
For any serious climate strategy:
- Short term: Push hard on avoidance — energy efficiency, renewable deployment, methane reduction — to slow the speed of warming and lock in fewer future emissions.
- Medium to long term: Scale up permanent removals to deal with past and residual emissions and manage overshoot.
- Starting now: Invest in building removal industries and supply chains, because gigaton-scale removal cannot be built overnight.
For developing, agriculture-based countries like Bangladesh, this shift creates a unique opportunity:
- Large volumes of agricultural residues (rice husk, straw, jute sticks, tea pruning, sawdust) are currently burned or left to rot, releasing CO₂ and particulates.
- These streams can instead be transformed into long-lived carbon stores (e.g., biochar) with strong co-benefits for soil health, water retention, crop productivity, and rural incomes.
- As global buyers increasingly reward durable removals with verifiable impact, such projects can access premium carbon markets, moving beyond low-value avoidance.
This is not just a climate story. It’s also about:
- Rural development
- Health and air pollution reduction
- Resilience and food security
- Positioning in future global carbon supply chains
Conclusion — Why Removal Should Lead (But Avoidance Still Matters)
The narrative around carbon markets is clearly shifting:
- From cheap volume to credible impact
- From any offset to high-integrity credits
- From mostly avoidance to removal at the core
Avoidance remains crucial — especially in the next decade — as the fastest way to prevent additional damage. But only removal can:
- Lower atmospheric CO₂
- Address legacy emissions
- Help bring the climate system back toward safer boundaries
For governments, investors, and project developers, the most resilient strategy is a both/and approach:
- Deep emission cuts now through avoidance
- Aggressive scaling of durable removals to secure the long-term climate outcome
If you care about real climate impact — not just accounting — then removal-first, with strong avoidance alongside, is the future.
The carbon market is growing up. The question is no longer, “How many credits did we buy?” It is: “What did those credits actually do to the atmosphere?”
And in that test, high-integrity carbon removals will define the next era of climate action.