Offsetting Carbon with Lemons: Adverse Selection and Certification in the Voluntary Carbon Market

To meet voluntary climate targets, firms often complement internal decarbonization efforts by purchasing carbon credits in the voluntary carbon market (VCM), which finance projects that reduce emissions elsewhere. However, these emissions reductions are difficult to verify, and growing evidence of overcrediting has cast doubt on the VCM's potential to genuinely offset emissions. We investigate how the VCM's defining features shape its climate effectiveness. Our model captures three central elements: adverse selection, as high-quality projects that truly reduce emissions are costlier yet difficult to distinguish from low-quality ones; imperfect third-party certification, as projects are screened based on a noisy signal of quality; and buyer preferences for non-carbon attributes, as some firms value credits that generate observable social or economic co-benefits beyond reducing emissions. We show that the market fails to sustain trade if certification is sufficiently noisy, as quality uncertainty erodes buyer confidence and triggers a market-for-lemons collapse. However, demand for co-benefits can sustain markets that would otherwise collapse. Yet in such cases, the market remains active but yields limited carbon abatement, as most traded credits are low-quality. We then examine policy and market design interventions reflecting recent developments in practice, such as penalizing buyers for greenwashing and offering credit portfolios. We show that these measures can be counterproductive for carbon mitigation if certification remains inaccurate. Accordingly, we demonstrate that the certifier’s incentives for accuracy can be strengthened by modifying its fee structure so that its revenue is tied to the market value rather than the volume of credits.