Carbon credit buyers are disadvantaged in the voluntary carbon market in a couple of key ways:

The market is vast and deeply fragmented, which means it should realistically require a fully-staffed team of experts to stay on top of the science, economic dynamics, relationships, and purchasing operations involved in a world-class carbon program. Very few companies in the market employ a team with all of these dedicated capabilities full-time.

Secondly, there’s a fundamental information asymmetry on the side of suppliers. They know their projects inside and out — buyers access this information through third parties or on the supplier’s terms. This is true in lots of specialized industries. But in carbon markets, the diversity of project types and the depth of knowledge required to source and diligence across many types skews the knowledge disparity even further.

Finally, there are the disadvantages created by company requirements to turn over every rock in the market looking for value, or to have a comprehensive audit trail that stands up to external and internal scrutiny. These requirements may be strategic, but the result can often be procurement cycles that aren’t opportunistic or fast enough to advantage the buyer.

Carbon markets can’t scale under these conditions.

That matters for the climate since the voluntary carbon market is a sleeping giant of climate finance. It matters for suppliers since access to revenue is the limiting factor for their growth. And it obviously matters to buyers, since they’re the ones being tied up or frozen out by these structural inefficiencies in carbon markets.

How Patch centralizes the voluntary carbon market

Patch’s platform brings together data, software, and (crucially) expertise to solve the biggest problems buyers face in the voluntary carbon market. Don’t think of it as an app or toolbox or even a marketplace. This is an AI-powered data engine that our climate experts both use and improve with one goal: to help our clients get maximum value and climate impact out of their carbon credit programs from end-to-end.

 Today, we’re announcing a major step forward toward that goal:

Patch now provides unparalleled visibility into the voluntary carbon market through a centralized database of more than 25,000 projects, including 100% of the projects from ICROA-endorsed registries. 

Before today, buyers needed access to all the registries as well as dozens of supply contacts on call just for informational purposes. Now the VCM is truly accessible in one pane of glass.

But it’s not just a bigger database. 25,000 projects is overwhelming enough without factoring in the differing data conventions for each one.

We’ve also centralized and standardized key data across sources so our experts can actually compare like-for-like. Methodology names and versions, project types and locations, issuance history and vintages, permanence, buffer pools and more — all are normalized into a single, queryable model.

Equally important, the critical details that drive diligence no longer live in scattered PDFs. For each project, Patch collates the essential documents that matter most (PDDs, methodologies, monitoring reports, risk assessments) so teams don’t waste cycles hunting for the “right” file before they can even begin analysis.

And because procurement depends on sourceability, the platform surfaces issuance activity and listings, including projects preliminarily listed but not yet validated. That gives buyers early signals on what’s moving from pipeline to reality.

From data to decisions: a clear pathway to action

We’ve massively increased the amount of pure data our in-house experts have at their fingertips. That’s objectively a good thing, but it has downsides. 

Data without a path to action just creates noise. We wanted to get to the pure signal. With 25,000 projects to sort through, it’s critical to start with the highest-potential fits and quickly discard the lowest-potential fits.

At the platform layer, our CSS (Climate Strategy and Solutions) team can get buyers an immediate shortlist via two sets of signals:

• Integrity heuristic: This is a science‑informed baseline that flags projects unlikely to meet Patch’s project acceptance criteria (PAC). 
• Issuance and activity: This record of issuance history and status is “real” (not projection or estimation), regularly updated, and focuses on projects that can actually deliver credits on timelines buyers care about.

Taken together, our proprietary integrity and issuance signals currently indicate that ~62% of projects in the market are unlikely to be best-fit for buyers. This dramatically improves the signal‑to‑noise ratio.

From there, Patch’s CSS experts form the finer mesh of the sieve: validating integrity against your specific risk profile, pressure‑testing assumptions, and aligning to budget and portfolio goals to present to you the 10-or-so projects most likely to match your strategic needs. Then they help you run a competitive and comprehensive procurement program to secure these credits at a competitive price.

The result isn’t just speed. It’s a defensible audit trail and a strategy that stands up to internal scrutiny and external expectations. Each decision point is traceable through sourcing, screening, shortlist, and transaction. Buyers can have confidence they’ve scoured the entire market for best fit and best value without an overly complex or lengthy process — and they can prove it to any stakeholder.

AI and expertise forms a virtuous cycle

AI is already breaking down information asymmetry in the VCM by processing vast, disparate data faster than any team could. At Patch, we apply it where it adds the most value:

• Carbon markets have a huge problem with data quality. AI helps Patch turn unstructured documents and data into clean and comparable fields.
• Information density is another kind of opacity. Patch uses AI to draft preliminary project overview pages with consistent language and information hierarchies so experts and buyers can grasp the basics at a glance.
• Scaling human capacity is critical to scaling the market. AI runs preliminary checks against our PAC, which are developed by human experts and grounded in science and market practice.

As these capabilities mature, AI will continue to enable diligence to scale: monitoring dMRV signals, surfacing site‑level patterns from geospatial data, and catching subtle inconsistencies across document sets. Moreover, AI has huge potential to scale other constricted areas of carbon markets. Helping quantify co-benefits is one place we’re excited about for the future. AI could accelerate co-benefit research, run pattern matching across geographies, and help anticipate the real-world impacts of co-benefits.

But AI shouldn’t be the decision‑maker — in the Patch platform, it’s an amplifier. The high‑stakes judgment remains human: interpreting context, weighing tradeoffs, and designing portfolios that meet real‑world constraints.

This is the core of our philosophy: combine the scale and speed of technology with the judgment and guidance of experts. That’s how more buyers — not just the biggest — can engage the market with clarity, confidence, and pace.

See it in action

The Patch platform isn’t a self-serve user portal to the VCM. It’s not a marketplace. Our CSS team are the primary users — but we hear time and again that buyers value the transparency and visibility afforded by this technology. Our customers will always have the ability to interact with the data, software, and even our experts within the platform as they choose.

If you want to see how our platform is working toward the VCM of the future, our team can show it to you today. See it in action or sign up for a meeting with an expert.

Our clients have been instrumental in building this next iteration of the Patch platform. They’re the ones telling us they need:

• Full visibility into the voluntary carbon market so they can streamline procurement and consolidate vendors
• Information transparency translated to their individual carbon programs so they can invest resources with more efficiency and greater climate impact
• A rock-solid audit trail that helps them defend their sustainability programs to any and all stakeholders

With this improvement, we’ve delivered on those needs and more. But we’re still listening. What should we build next?