Do No Harm, Do Markets Care? Evidence on Safeguard Provision and Credit Retirement in Voluntary Carbon Markets

The voluntary carbon market (VCM) plays an increasingly important role in financing forest-based climate mitigation. However, the viability of this mechanism relies on project outcomes being commensurated into a single carbon metric (tCO₂e), which can obscure other social and environmental dimensions and, if neglected, lead to harm. Yet the evaluation of forest carbon projects’ provisions to ensure baseline environmental and social safeguards remains incomprehensive and fragmented. This limits market transparency and the ability to empirically assess whether safeguard provisions influence market behavior. To address this gap, this study develops a universal safeguard assessment framework composed of four overarching dimensions: Social, Environmental, Economic, and Governance, further broken down into 14 specific criteria. Applying this framework to Verra-registered forest projects, each project’s safeguard provision is measured quantitively from publicly available project documentation. These safeguard scores are then linked with transaction-level data to examine whether stronger safeguard provisions are associated with shorter trading life, which is the time from credit issuance to retirement, taken as a proxy for market uptake. Overall, we find little evidence that the market consistently rewards stronger safeguards. Signs of faster credit retirement appear only in better-measured segments, suggesting any reward is segment-specific rather than market-wide. These findings highlight the importance of improving VCM infrastructure with more transparent and comparable disclosures, standardized safeguard criteria, and credible safeguard rating or label. These improvements would facilitate more reliable market analyses and help align market incentives with high-integrity climate action