A Dutch investigation says most carbon credits don't deliver — what that means if you're buying today
In September 2026, NOS's daily podcast De Dag dedicated an episode to investigative journalist Mira Sys of Follow the Money, who together with Ties Gijzen wrote the book Wie betaalt mag vervuilen ("Who Pays May Pollute"). Their reporting argues that more than 80% of the carbon credit projects they examined failed to deliver the emissions reductions they were sold on, and that three decades of carbon offsetting have produced little measurable climate benefit overall. Listen to the episode here.
This isn't a one-off scandal — it's the pattern
We already wrote about the 2023 Guardian/Die Zeit investigation into Verra's rainforest credits, which found that most of the credits examined likely didn't represent real reductions. Sys and Gijzen's reporting makes the broader claim: that the failure isn't limited to one registry or one project type, but runs across the voluntary carbon market's history. We can't independently verify their 80% figure — we haven't read the full book, and different studies of this market use different methodologies and reach different numbers — but the direction of the finding lines up with everything else that's been reported on this market since 2023, and we think it's required listening if you're weighing whether to buy credits at all.
What this means if you're buying credits today
It doesn't mean offsetting is worthless — it means "certified" and "registered" aren't enough on their own, and haven't been for a while. A credit's real value depends on specifics most buyers never see: how conservative the project's baseline is, how it accounts for the risk that the stored carbon gets released again later (reversal risk), and whether an independent body has re-assessed it against current standards — not just the registry's own process. Those are exactly the four things our Core Score is built to surface — permanence, leakage risk, verification quality, and community/biodiversity co-benefits — shown next to the biggest open uncertainty for each project, not a single reassuring number.
What we actually do about it
We link to reporting like this ourselves, unprompted, because a marketplace that only shows you the good news isn't one you should trust with your money. If you want the mechanics, see how we score projects and understanding the risks.
The three example projects currently listed on OpenCarbon are placeholders while we onboard real, registry-verified projects. See our Trust & Transparency page for what changes once they're live.