What’s next for DMRV?

By 2050, the world needs to cut emissions by 50%. Such a massive transition requires substantial scaling of market and policy mechanisms that incentivize decarbonization and emission reductions. Effective carbon markets are a vital component of this transition, but the current manual verification process takes too long to deliver the climate action the voluntary carbon market was created to deliver.

Digital Monitoring, Reporting and Verification (DMRV) is a necessary next step for carbon markets to reach the scale needed to reach US$10-40 billion in value by 2030 and contribute substantially to the fight against the climate crisis. This is why accelerating the deployment of DMRV innovations is key to increasing integrity and efficiencies in the carbon markets.

Nadine Planzer, Business Development Director at SustainCERT, shares her key insight from engaging with carbon market actors in 2023, and what’s in store for DMRV in 2024.

SustainCERT was actively engaged in the DMRV space in 2023, organizing three events for carbon market actors, including a workshop in Turkey, a panel discussion at North America Climate Summit and Asian Climate Summit.

What would DMRV mean for different actors in the space?

• For project developers, a real benefit of DMRV is that the MRV process becomes more efficient and streamlined, allowing them to detect and address issues sooner. Near-real time issuances of credits would enable earlier and more consistent cash flows and reduce the financial risks for project proponents.
• For buyers, DMRV will increase transparency and provide them with insights from real-time monitoring. This enables access to better data for risk analysis.
• For standards that set the rules and requirements in the voluntary carbon market, they understand that DMRV will play a key role in scaling up the market. Now they need to update their rules, requirements and processes to accommodate different DMRV solutions.

Acknowledging the benefits of DMRV and the need to increase the speed and scale of climate action brings us to the next question; how do we best approach DMRV in carbon markets? Do we retrofit outdated methodologies to include DMRV approaches, or do we allow for new digital platforms to monitor, report, and verify data for the issuance of carbon credits?

There is still a lot of work to do around rolling out DMRV solutions and integrating them into the rules and requirements of standards. Standards need to come out with a clear vision on how to do this and how carbon market actors can best engage in the process. We also need carbon market actors like project developers, Validation and Verification Bodies, and investors to actively engage in digitization efforts to ensure interoperability and to scale up adoption.

As a first step towards digitization, SustainCERT offers a verification service powered by a digital platform. It streamlines the verification process for project developers and allows for data secure, remote collaboration with the auditors. The user-friendly interface centralizes all the contracting, planning, and review phases in one online portal.

We will also continue to engage with the market at events on the topic and with key standards, including Verra, Gold Standard and others, around the acceptance and operationalization of DMRV solutions. For example, our vision is to digitally connect the SustainCERT Platform with the Verra Project Hub so we can streamline the complete verification process for our clients. We are working closely together with Verra on connecting the two digital platforms (via API) so SustainCERT can retrieve data from the Verra Project Hub for the verification process. The aim is to connect later in 2024.

To find out more about our work on DMRV please reach out to Nadine Planzer – Business Development Director at SustainCERT at nadine.planzer@sustain-cert.com

Our digitally enabled platform for Verra verification streamlines workflows and reduces manual steps in the verification process.