Verra cancels four tree planting projects in China. And starts reviews of 45 more projects
“Multiple carbon projects in China are facing serious allegations regarding the authenticity of government approval documents”
Verra has cancelled four afforestation projects in China and has started reviews of 45 other projects.
Here’s how Verra announced its most recent embarrassing blunder on 12 December 2025:
Multiple carbon projects in China are facing serious allegations regarding the authenticity of government approval documents, resulting in Verra rejecting four projects and initiating reviews of 45 others.
Verra requires that all projects registered in the Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) Program do not violate local laws. Under Chinese regulations, Agriculture, Forestry, and Other Land Use (AFOLU) projects must obtain the necessary government approvals and demonstrate that they comply with the country’s land use and forestry requirements.
The validation/verification bodies (VVBs) of the four projects below could not confirm that the relevant authorities authorized the projects, nor that the documentation submitted by the project proponent, Guizhou Baiheng Fertiliser Co., Ltd., was authentic.
Verra has now rejected the projects after finalizing their quality control reviews (QCRs).
Verra started its review of the four projects in November 2024. In its Findings Report, Verra writes that,
Verra has received a complaint that suggests local authorities may not have authorized the carbon project and that the documentation presented by the project proponent relating to such authorization may be falsified.
And Verra concludes that,
The VVB could not confirm that the project was authorized by the relevant authorities nor that the documentation submitted by the project proponent was authentic.
The validation/verification bodies for the projects were CTI Certification Co., LTD and TÜV Nord Cert GmbH.
The four projects had issued a total of 4.42 million carbon credits. Verra has written to the project developer, “and will now seek replacement of the 4.42 million Verified Carbon Units (VCUs)”. Verra will also cancel the 491,163 carbon credits the projects contributed to Verra’s buffer pool.
In other words Verra is asking Guizhou Baiheng Fertiliser to buy 4.42 carbon credits in Verra’s registry and retire them. Given the large number of fake carbon credits in Verra’s registry, there is no way of knowing how many of the carbon credits that Guizhou Baiheng Fertiliser buys and retires would also be fake.
But of course there is in any case no way that Verra can force Guizhou Baiheng Fertilizer to fork out millions of dollars to buy carbon credits to replace the fake carbon credits issued by, er, Verra.
This is the same mechanism that Verra is hoping can “compensate” the 15.2 million fake credits issued to the Kariba REDD project in Zimbabwe.
CarbonPlan points out that the “reveals a deep structural flaw” in Verra’s system — and Verra’s is the global carbon market’s largest registry.
The four projects — and the companies that bought the carbon credits
The four projects were tree planting projects in Guizhou Province;
The Qianxinan Afforestation Project covered an area of 32,047 hectares of “barren land”. The project sold a total of 1,394,041 carbon credits to companies that include PetroChina International, Goldman Sachs, Huawei Technologies, Delhi International Airport, Takeda Pharmaceutical, Shell, Temasek Holdings, DBS Bank, Climate Impact X, and Nestlé.
The Puzhen Afforestation Project covered an area of 26,551 hectares of “barren land”. The project sold a total of 170,715 carbon credits, all of which were bought by Shell.
The Xiguan Afforestation Project covered an area of 25,449 hectares of “barren land”. The project sold a total of 1,127,803 carbon credits to companies that include Shell, PetroChina International, Tokyo Gas, Hitachi, the 19th Asian Games Hangzhou 2022, KPMG, and We Are Neutral.
The Guinan Afforestation Project covered an area of 46,000 hectares of ”barren hill and degraded lands”. The project sold a total of 1,727,894 carbon credits to companies that include Apple, ASUSTek Computer, PetroChina International, Standard Chartered Bank, DBS Bank, Temasek Holdings, Shell, Hitachi, Climate Impact X, and Takeda Pharmaceuticals.
Climate Impact X, which bought credits from two of these projects, is a Singapore-based global carbon trading company founded by Temasek, DBS, Singapore Exchange, and Standard Chartered Bank. It’s board of directors includes Tan Su Shan, the CEO of DBS Group, Claire O’Neill of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, Dilhan Pillay Sandrasegara, the CEO of Temasek Holdings, and Bill Winters, the CEO of Standard Chartered. Winters is also a member of the Distinguished Advisory Group of the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market.
On its website the Climate Impact X describes itself as “Your trusted gateway to the global environmental markets.”
Whoopsie.
The tip of the iceberg
These four companies could well be just the tip of a very large iceberg. Verra has also started quality control reviews for 35 more projects:
Verra is requiring the projects’ respective VVBs to contact the appropriate Chinese government authorities to verify whether these projects were granted valid authorization. Where this cannot be confirmed, Verra may pursue further actions, including potential project rejection and requiring VCU replacement.
These projects have issued a total of 14.2 million carbon credits, of which 7.1 million have been retired. The projects contributed about 1.5 million carbon credits to Verra’s buffer pool. These projects are currently on hold and cannot be issued new credits.
Verra is also reviewing another 10 rice cultivation projects in China. In March 2025, Verra suspended the validation/verification bodies involved in auditing these projects. These projects have issued a total of 7.1 million carbon credits of which 4.9 million have been retired. These projects contributed about 780,000 carbon credits to Verra’s buffer pool.
The cancellation of four Chinese tree-planting projects by Verra should not be interpreted as a spontaneous market correction. It reflects a much clearer institutional reality: China has never opened a legally recognized pathway for Verra-issued voluntary carbon credits to be integrated into its national carbon accounting system (National Registry, NR).
Under Verra’s own rules, AFOLU projects must demonstrate valid host-country authorization and compliance with applicable national laws. In China’s case, land use, forestry, and ecological restoration projects are subject to strict state control. While project developers claimed support or approval from local government departments and submitted related documents during VCS registration, Verra’s Quality Control Review revealed a consistent result once independent verification was attempted: no verifiable record of formal government authorization could be confirmed, and no competent authority provided official validation.
This finding led Verra to cancel approximately 4.42 million VCUs and to initiate broader reviews of additional projects.
(See Verra’s statement: Serious allegations prompt Verra to reject China projects and launch broader reviews.)
This outcome is not a matter of incomplete paperwork. It represents a failure at the level of sovereign authorization. Under the Paris Agreement framework, mitigation outcomes must either be embedded within, or demonstrably excluded from, a host country’s national greenhouse gas accounting. China has not established a mechanism that allows Verra-certified voluntary credits to be recognized, reconciled, or authorized within its national registry or NDC accounting architecture. As a result, these projects were never capable of demonstrating that their claimed emission reductions sat outside China’s national accounts.
Seen in this light, Verra’s actions were not discretionary market decisions. They were responses to the limits imposed by state sovereignty and national climate governance. When verification bodies could not obtain confirmation from competent authorities, Verra had no institutional basis to continue recognizing the projects.
The broader implication is straightforward:
• China has not provided a sovereign authorization framework for Verra-issued credits;
• These projects never entered China’s national accounting system and could not meet Paris-aligned requirements;
• Verra’s intervention reflects regulatory boundary enforcement, not market volatility.
In short, the issue is not that these projects failed the market.
They failed because they were never permitted to exist within China’s sovereign carbon accounting system in the first place.