New EU rules are coming for carbon offset claims — here's what changes on 27 September 2026
If you've ever seen a product labelled "climate neutral" and wondered exactly what that meant, EU regulators have been wondering the same thing — and new rules are arriving that specifically target vague claims built on offsetting alone.
The headline date: 27 September 2026
The EU's Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition Directive (ECGT) becomes binding in the Netherlands on 27 September 2026. It bans unsubstantiated environmental claims and restricts the use of sustainability labels to recognised certification schemes — so a company can no longer just say "we're climate neutral because we bought some offsets" without being able to back that up in detail. This is exactly why we've been careful on this site to talk about buying and retiring specific, traceable credits rather than making broad "neutral" claims about OpenCarbon itself.
Dutch regulators are already active here
The ACM (the Dutch consumer and markets authority) has been actively enforcing against greenwashing and carbon-offset claims in the Netherlands — this isn't a future risk, it's a current one for anyone making sustainability claims to Dutch consumers. Separately, the AFM (Dutch financial markets authority) has publicly supported extending more oversight to the voluntary carbon market itself, though that isn't law yet.
A related, unresolved thread: the Green Claims Directive
A separate proposed EU law, the Green Claims Directive, would have gone further — requiring pre-approval of environmental claims before they could be published. The European Commission signalled an intent to withdraw it in mid-2025, but as of this writing that's not fully resolved procedurally. We're not treating its disappearance as guaranteed.
What's actually changing for how credits get certified
Separately from consumer-claims law, the EU's Carbon Removals and Carbon Farming (CRCF) Regulation has been in force since December 2024, and the European Commission adopted its first certification methodologies — covering agriculture and agroforestry, peatland rewetting, and afforestation — in July 2026. This is a framework for certifying removals within the EU, distinct from the voluntary registries (Verra, Gold Standard) most credits sold today go through. We're watching how CCP-labelled and CRCF-certified status line up, since we expect CRCF certification to become a meaningful positive signal in project scoring over time, not just a compliance checkbox.
What this means if you're buying credits
Regulation catching up to this market is, on balance, good news for buyers — it raises the cost of vague claims and rewards sellers who can actually substantiate what they're selling. It's also exactly why we built our Trust Score around independently checkable inputs rather than an in-house black box: that's the kind of substantiation this direction of regulation is going to demand anyway.
This is general information, not legal advice — if you're a business making your own sustainability claims, talk to a lawyer about how these rules apply to you specifically.