Challenges and Opportunities in the Voluntary Carbon Market
Overview: The voluntary carbon market faces several challenges that undermine its credibility and effectiveness. One of the main obstacles is ensuring the environmental integrity of carbon credits, making sure that emission reductions or removals are real, additional, permanent, and properly verified. Given the large number of both new and established processes for CO₂ utilization, sequestration, and storage, and the lack of uniform standards for so many possible processes, the absence of strict oversight facilitates “greenwashing” practices, where companies overstate or misrepresent their environmental benefits.
Additionally, carbon credit price volatility complicates long-term project financial planning, discouraging investors. The current wildfires in Portugal, besides being disastrous, increase uncertainty around biomass-based CCS (Carbon Capture and Storage) solutions. In this context, our biochar project is also crucial, as it is essential to promote education and awareness among companies, investors, and citizens about how the market works and its importance, ensuring informed and responsible participation.
As with everything else in human societies, it will be people’s active participation that guarantees the transparency, efficiency, and relevance of this effort for future generations.
Despite these challenges, the voluntary carbon market offers significant opportunities. It can drive innovative carbon sequestration projects, such as afforestation, CO₂ mineralization, and biochar production, contributing to effective, verifiable, and transparent CO₂ removal from the atmosphere. It also serves as an essential funding source for green initiatives, especially in regions with limited public resources. These projects can directly align with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), promoting climate action, life on land, and sustainable economic growth in areas experiencing socioeconomic decline.
A particularly relevant opportunity lies in projects that combine direct CO₂ capture from industrial sources with mineralization technologies, enabling the permanent storage of carbon in large volumes while adding value to industrial waste.
Focus on Portugal: In Portugal, the development of the voluntary carbon market faces hurdles such as initial bureaucracy and a lack of recognized methodologies adapted to the national context, making it harder to implement and validate local projects. However, there is substantial potential in valuing areas with low economic productivity but high carbon sequestration capacity, such as degraded forests or underutilized farmland. Promoting sustainable forestry practices, restoring ecosystems, and adopting nature-based solutions can not only increase CO₂ removals but also create jobs and additional income for local communities, strengthening both environmental and socioeconomic resilience.
The Alentejo and Beira regions are particularly important for reforestation, biochar, and mineralization solutions using mining waste, as these areas have the most significant biomass growth in Portugal and abundant mine tailings rich in metals. These tailings can be processed to recover metals, and the remaining material—now with trace concentrations—can be used for CO₂ sequestration through mineralization, producing a new material suitable for soil liming and enrichment.
In this emerging and vital voluntary carbon market, a combination of new and established actions and processes will lead us toward carbon neutrality—a crucial goal to help avoid the drastic climate changes and impacts on future generations.
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