IETA's Safe Harbour for Credit Claims: Proposal, Government Action and Buyer Practice

At a Glance · IETA's Safe Harbour

Governments should give companies that use high-integrity credits and make accurate claims a safe harbour from greenwashing liability, since buyers now face litigation over what they say about credits as much as over the credits themselves, with suits against Apple, Delta, Eurowings and Danone extending from oil and gas to airlines and consumer goods, and although the Apple and Danone cases were dismissed at the pleading stage, a company following current guidance can still be taken to court and made to defend its claim, so that some action is better than no action, provided the action is real, verifiable and robust.

IETA ties protection to the claim as well as to the credit: a company would be protected for a contribution claim, or for a net zero claim backed by a published roadmap, using credits that meet the Paris Agreement Crediting Mechanism, Core Carbon Principle or CORSIA criteria, while vague neutrality claims of the kind the EU has already banned would remain outside it.

The soft route, coordinated guidance or an eco-label that courts can weigh, is the right place to start, since it requires no legislation and can be aligned across jurisdictions, and the claims rules should stay strict, although a safe harbour tied to these labels would direct demand to a smaller and higher-priced pool, with CCP-labelled credits trading at a clear premium in our Market Watch data and making up only 9.3% of the tonnes retired in 2025.

IETA's paper, Unlocking Demand in Voluntary Carbon Markets through Safe Harbour Mechanisms: A Recommendation to Governments, argues that companies using high-integrity credits now face litigation and reputational risk when they communicate their climate action, and that this risk is discouraging purchases at a time when credit retirements have been flat for three years.¹

The litigation it describes takes three forms, challenges to the wording of a claim, to the integrity of the credit and to the buyer's own conduct, brought mostly under consumer protection, unfair competition and common law, and it has spread from fossil fuel companies to aviation, consumer goods and finance, with cases including Dib v Apple, Berrin v Delta, Deutsche Umwelthilfe v Eurowings and Dorris v Danone, of which the Apple and Danone cases have since been dismissed.¹

To IETA's knowledge no jurisdiction has enacted a safe harbour dedicated to carbon-credit claims; California's AB 1911, which would create a rebuttable presumption that a claim resting on credits from approved programmes is valid, was held in committee in May 2026 and did not advance in the 2025 to 2026 session, and guidance in Singapore, the United Kingdom, Switzerland and Japan stops short of legal protection, while companies following an Australian government programme have still been sued.¹

A safe harbour, in IETA's definition, is a legal provision that protects against liability or enforcement when defined conditions are met and that confers no blanket immunity, and the paper builds it on seven pillars that require two conditions together, credit integrity and claim integrity.¹

Table 1 · IETA's seven foundational pillars. Source: IETA, Unlocking Demand in Voluntary Carbon Markets through Safe Harbour Mechanisms, October 2026, section 04.

The paper recommends that governments start with a coordinated soft safe harbour or eco-label, aligned across jurisdictions through the Coalition to Grow Carbon Markets, and build statutory safe harbours in parallel, and it argues that high-integrity markets could channel about US$30 to 140 billion a year of debt-free finance to emerging economies outside China, a range drawn from the 2025 report of the Independent High-Level Expert Group on climate finance.¹

Our Market Watch tracks CCP-labelled, CORSIA-eligible and PACM credit supply, issuance and prices.

Governments have begun to set the rules a safe harbour would rest on, although none yet offers legal protection: fourteen governments have joined the Coalition to Grow Carbon Markets behind its Shared Principles, the United Kingdom, Switzerland and the European Union have set out what claims may rest on credits, and the revised Oxford Offsetting Principles set the hierarchy most of these rules follow.^2,3,4,5,6

Table 2 · Government action and principles on the use of carbon credits in claims. Sources: Coalition to Grow Carbon Markets; UK Government; FOEN, UV-2561; Directive (EU) 2024/825; University of Oxford; IETA, appendix B.

IETA's proposal sits inside these rules rather than beyond them, since contribution claims are accepted under every one of them, the vague neutrality claims it excludes are the ones the European Union has banned at product level and Swiss guidance treats as unprovable, and the one point of friction is the roadmap-backed net zero claim, which Swiss guidance accepts only on credits carrying a corresponding adjustment whereas IETA treats adjustments as optional, such that a company relying on CCP or CORSIA credits without adjustment would be protected under IETA's design and still exposed in Switzerland; the step IETA adds is the one the Coalition's member governments have said they will explore, recognition for companies that follow the rules, and we analysed the European position in the EU offset claims ban and the EU claims rules for credit buyers.^1,2

The same hierarchy runs through corporate targets, since SBTi's Corporate Net-Zero Standard V2.0 recognises credits for ongoing emissions responsibility and removals but not in place of reductions, which matches the first two Oxford Principles; our analysis of the final V2.0 sets out how credits are treated, and the same position runs through the VCMI Claims Code of Practice, which the UK consultation proposed to endorse and which from 2026 accepts only CCP-approved or Article 6.4 credits for a Carbon Integrity Claim, and through ISO 14068-1 on carbon neutrality, while ISO's draft net zero standard, ISO 14060, was sent back for revision in September 2026.^6,9

Carbon markets can be a much larger instrument for climate action than they are today, although the growth in our VCM Market Outlook 2026 comes from the SBTi V2 rulebook rather than from legal certainty: voluntary demand has held near 157 million tonnes a year, about US$1 billion, while on the V2 base case demand rebuilds to about 290 million tonnes by 2036 and about 1,190 million tonnes by 2050, with removals rising from about 11% of demand to about 41% and 82%, and a safe harbour bears on how much of that demand companies are willing to act on and speak about in public, since IETA itself states that the protection reduces the risk of buying and does not create the demand.^1,7

Voluntary carbon market demand, Mt CO2e a year

RemovalsAvoidance and reduction

Today

about US$1 bn a year

157 Mt · removals 11%

2036

base case

290 Mt · removals 41%

2050

base case

1,190 Mt · removals 82%

Compliance demand for authorised credits comes on top: about 200 Mt of stated sovereign Article 6 demand to 2030 and a CORSIA Phase 1 obligation of 203 Mt for 2024 to 2026.

Compliance demand adds to this, since sovereign Article 6 buyers and CORSIA airlines carry the obligations shown beneath Figure 1, so a safe harbour that gave corporate buyers certainty comparable to these schemes would remove one of the barriers between the targets companies have set and the credits they are willing to buy and name, provided the claims it protects stay tied to outcomes that are real and verifiable, particularly in removals, where our outlook finds a deficit of about 97 million tonnes by 2036.^7,8

Our Market Watch tracks fifteen voluntary registries each week, which allows IETA’s two conditions to be set against what buyers retire and what they say when they retire it. Voluntary retirements have been broadly flat since 2021, consistent with the stagnation IETA attributes in part to litigation risk.¹⁰

On the side of credit integrity, the pool a safe harbour would name is still small: CCP-labelled credits made up 9.3% of voluntary retirements in 2025, up from a low base, as Figure 3 shows, and they already trade at a clear premium to unlabelled credits. Most of the rest of the market still rests on methodologies that the standards have since replaced.¹⁰

CCP-labelled share of voluntary issuance and retirements, % of tonnes

IssuanceRetirements (value shown)

2.0%

2019

1.8%

2020

1.4%

2021

2.1%

2022

3.4%

2023

4.7%

2024

9.3%

2025

On the side of claim integrity, the stated purposes in the registries’ own retirement records suggest that most buyers already make the kind of claims IETA would protect, although product neutrality claims, which the European Union has banned since 27 September 2026, persist and are more common among buyers without a science-based target, as Figure 2 indicates. The breakdown by year, sector and target status is in the data pack.¹⁰

Stated purpose of voluntary retirements, share of tonnes stating a purpose

Corporate footprintOn behalf of clientsProduct or service neutralityCompliance or carbon taxEvent, travel or project

2019

product 12%

2020

product 14%

2021

product 13%

2022

product 10%

2023

product 9%

2024

product 11%

2025

product 8%

Between 30% and 40% of retired tonnes state a purpose in any year; the bars split what was stated.

Full claims breakdown in the free data pack ↓

Read together, the record suggests that a safe harbour on IETA’s design would change buyer behaviour more on the credit side than on the claim side, since the immediate effect of protection would be a shift of demand toward a labelled pool that is still a small part of the market.

Until any jurisdiction acts, buyers can build their own position on the same two conditions.

1. Buy credits that carry a recognised label, CCP, CORSIA eligibility or PACM issuance, and record why each purchase qualifies.
2. Make contribution claims by default, and make net zero claims only alongside a published and updated transition plan.
3. Drop vague claims such as climate neutral or carbon positive, which IETA's proposal would leave unprotected and which EU and Swiss rules already exclude.
4. Keep the evidence for the claim, the activity and the credit together, since litigation tests all three.
5. Check your own record against your peers’, since the stated purpose, CCP and rating shares, methodology era and project countries of every named buyer group are public in the registries and set out in Market Watch’s Buyer explorer, which is where a claimant would look first.

A safe harbour tied to these labels would also concentrate demand on a limited pool, as Table 3 shows, since CCP-labelled offers command a premium over unlabelled project types in our Market Watch data and our CORSIA model puts the stock of CORSIA-eligible units at less than a quarter of the Phase 1 obligation for airlines.⁸

Table 3 · Prices and volumes for credits that would meet IETA's credit criteria. Sources: Climate Decode Market Watch, VCM price database, June 2026 snapshot of offer prices; Climate Decode CORSIA Supply and Demand model, central case, August 2026.

IETA notes that a safe harbour reduces the risk of buying but does not create the business case, so demand will still depend on targets, compliance schemes and the value companies place on acting beyond their value chain.¹

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Climate Decode helps buyers select credits and build claims that meet current rules and anticipated safe harbours.

Notes

Sources

This article describes a recommendation to governments; no safe harbour for carbon-credit claims has yet been enacted, and it is not legal advice.