Scroll down for the key takeaways 👇
On Thursday 19th June, we hosted a webinar that explored first-hand perspectives on early-stage project risk.
Dr Spencer Meyer, BeZero’s Chief Ratings Officer, was joined by Dr Santhosh Shankar, Managing Director, Sustainability and Carbon Markets at Artemeter, and Dr Miguel A. Moraes, Project Director at re.green to discuss common pain points, practical solutions, and what “high-quality” really means to them.
Laurel Gray, Principal Product Manager at BeZero, also introduced BeZero’s Pre-rating Scorecard, an interactive, data-driven tool helping users assess potential climate impact in unrated projects with confidence.
Here are some key takeaways
As carbon markets mature, a large part of the focus is shifting upstream—towards assessing project quality before credits are even issued. This discussion revealed important insights on market trends, developer challenges, expectations from investors and buyers, and the need for innovative tools to help market actors assess quality early.
Dr Spencer Meyer: the case for early assessment
Kicking off the session, Dr Spencer Meyer framed the discussion around market dynamics driving interest in early-stage projects. With spot markets constrained by limited high-quality supply, investors are turning to the primary market to secure credible carbon assets upfront. He emphasised that early-stage risk assessments help buyers mitigate delivery risk, lock in better pricing, and hedge against future scarcity.
Spencer also noted how projects drastically vary in price, highlighting the risk of a ‘race to the bottom’:
“Project types often considered higher-quality, for example like engineered removals, require significant capital at an early stage to get off the ground. This runs the risk of creating a race to the bottom, as buyers ultimately look for the most cost-effective solutions.
Dr Miguel A. Moraes: integrity as the foundation
re.green’s Director of Projects Dr Miguel Moraes, with a background in biodiversity and ecological restoration, brought a developer’s lens to the conversation. He argued that carbon markets must be about more than just carbon—they must serve people, ecosystems, and global climate goals.
At re.green, carbon is seen as a proxy for broader impact. Key to ensuring project quality, he said, is scientific rigour, robust datasets, and a commitment to integrity and standards. But financing remains a major challenge:
“We need to access the capital to push the solutions forward. We need to prove the concept. We need to show that this is happening right now. We need guarantees. We need innovation in insurance”, Miguel stressed.
Dr Santhosh Shankar: a holistic investor perspective
As an investor focused on middle-market climate projects, Santhosh outlined how Artemeter screens innovative, sometimes ‘niche’ opportunities. Beyond standard carbon metrics like additionality, permanence and leakage, his team looks at developer experience and resources, and whether partnerships are in place to ensure end-to-end execution of large scale projects.
“The ability to go from 100 acres to 1,000 or 10,000 acres is a totally different game. When you talk about scaling these projects, there are very few project developers who have that institutional capability and capacity to be able to carry out these things at scale”, he noted.
Red flags often include lack of attention to detail, reduction claims that aren’t backed by data, and a lack of digital MRV infrastructure. Santhosh also emphasised the need for standardised, enforceable contracts to facilitate transactions, and spur demand.
Laurel Gray: tools for scalable due diligence
In her role as Principal Product Manager, Laurel Gray creates products for BeZero’s customers that fit their specific needs. One thing that comes up repeatedly is the need for rapid tools to better understand how to build and invest in better projects.
“It’s about being able to get into the nitty gritty, but not so deep into the nitty gritty that you need to spend weeks and weeks trying to do your due diligence. It’s about faster triaging or getting a quick sense check of how a project might have the potential for carbon impact.”, Laurel explained.
Laurel also demonstrated BeZero’s new Pre-ratings Scorecard tool, designed to offer fast, indicative scores based on fundamental inputs from project documentation. These interactive scorecards—covering sectors such as Biochar and Cookstoves, with more to follow—give users a real-time view of how specific project parameters affect risk across key dimensions such as additionality and carbon accounting.
The tool supports better triage and earlier engagement, while full ex ante ratings continue to provide in-depth analysis for investment-grade decisions.
Looking ahead: a market in the “best place it’s ever been”
The panel acknowledged how much progress has already been made in this space from the perspective of technology, financial sophistication, and transparency, and concluded with reflections on the future of carbon markets and buyer demand.
Miguel highlighted that from an implementation perspective, the science is already here. From planes dispersing seeds, to tracking biodiversity trends with eDNA sampling or acoustic monitoring, to trends in restoration, there’s a lot going on - but moving these solutions forward requires access to capital, incentives, and guarantees.
He also noted that both the public and private sectors have an important part to play, and that compliance markets and regulation have the potential to create a safe space for carbon transactions. Miguel cautioned that we can’t get trapped in ‘business as usual’, at the risk of flooding the market with low-quality credits.
Santhosh would like to see more ways to facilitate market access for smaller buyers in an aggregated way. He highlighted how investment vehicles with industry-specific credit supply could bring much needed liquidity to the market.
Santhosh also emphasised the need to build technical and scientific capacity, recognising how innovations such as ratings supports his due diligence work, and helps bring more novel types of projects into being.
All agreed that pre-issuance quality assessments are becoming essential tools in the shift toward a high-integrity, scalable carbon market.
In closing, Spencer said:
“There's clearly a lot of work happening in the pre-issuance market, a lot of good things are happening behind the scenes, and some of that is out there happening very publicly. It seems to me like the infrastructure is in place, the evolving science is in place, the finance facilities are starting to show up, and things are heading in the right direction.”