Abhimanyu Rathi

Founder & CEO, RenewCred | Climate & Water Scientist

[Abhimanyu Rathi @ClimateRathi]

The Forest Department planted it. 60 years later, the carbon market pays to remove it. Between those 2 facts sits a lesson every carbon project should study.

The tree is Prosopis juliflora, planted across Gujarat's Banni grassland in the 1960s to fight salinity. Locals call it gando bawal, the mad tree. It now covers more than half of one of Asia's largest grasslands. Land that gave up to 4,000 kg of fodder a hectare in the 1960s was down to about 620 kg by 1999. Governments pay to remove it, but the uprooted piles are usually burnt or left to rot, so the carbon escapes anyway.

The carbon market saw a clean fix. Char the piles, lock the carbon, sell removal credits, fund the cleanup. In January 2025, Google made its first Indian carbon removal purchase on exactly this idea: 100,000 tonnes of biochar credits by 2030, the largest biochar deal at the time, certified through Puro Earth.

Then this month, Mongabay India reported from inside the landscape. At Sangnara, about 11 hectares were cleared in 2024. Within a year, the new saplings had nearly doubled. The money pays for mature trees and for biochar. Nothing pays for the regrowth. Villagers are turning against the projects for that exact reason.

The ecology explains why. A 2021 study in the same grassland compared 2 removal methods. Uproot the tree fully, and native plants return. Cut it above the root, and almost nothing recovers, because it regrows from the stump. Cutting above the root is what people do once the tree becomes a harvest. Pay per tonne of wood, and the invader becomes a crop.

A study from Kenya's Baringo county adds an uncomfortable finding. Restored grassland rebuilt soil carbon a metre deep. The invading tree added carbon only in the top layer, and killed the grass beneath. Even on carbon, the tree is not the asset. The grass is.

A good credit pays for the invader's funeral. A bad one pays its salary.

Is carbon finance the villain then? No. It is the first scalable money this cleanup has ever seen. Village committees that uproot and reseed had restored about 3,000 hectares by 2022. The char keeps its credit; the locked carbon is the product. The fix is in what else gets paid for: the hectare kept clear, the grass that returns, the 3 to 5 years of regrowth work, and a sunset date for the feedstock, the raw material the reactors run on.

The stakes are rising by law. India's compressed biogas mandate hit 1.05% of city gas in its first year, against a 1% target, per Parliament this month. The obligation climbs to 5% by 2028-29, with 750 plants planned. Industrial demand for biomass is arriving. Whatever payment design the carbon market gets right or wrong on the mad tree, the gas grid will copy at scale.

#ClimateChange #India

[Abhimanyu Rathi @ClimateRathi]

Picture a green job and you will see a rooftop: the solar technician, the wind engineer, the mechanic under an electric vehicle. The jobs that decide whether any of it can be trusted are the ones nobody pictures.

My article in Outlook Business this week makes that argument at length. India will need 35 million green jobs by 2047 by the Skill Council's estimate, yet green postings are growing nearly twice as fast as green talent, and one national survey found only about a third of urban youth could say what a green job is. The gap runs deepest in the invisible layer: the people who define how a tonne of carbon is calculated, gather the evidence, audit it, and guard the registries that trade it. A biochar methodology is equal parts pyrolysis chemistry, sampling statistics and contract law. That table has empty seats.

The piece closes with the simplest advice I know. Pick one climate domain and learn its science properly. Pair it with one skill from the digital, financial or legal world. Then read a single carbon methodology end to end; it will teach more than most textbooks.

Additionally, there is #RenewCred's Climate Academy to support.

Link: https://t.co/8kFUDV7oQw

#ClimateChange

[Abhimanyu Rathi @ClimateRathi]

Four prices tell the story of carbon in 2026.

USD 6.34. The average voluntary credit in 2024, per Ecosystem Marketplace. Second consecutive year of decline. The price of conscience alone.

USD 21.25. Fastmarkets' spot assessment this year for credits eligible under CORSIA, the airline scheme. Same kind of tonnes as the first rung, plus one ingredient: a legal obligation hunting scarce eligibility. IATA sizes the need at 170 to 236 million tonnes. About 40 million qualify.

USD 36. Where Swiss authorised units have traded while comparable voluntary credits sat at USD 5 to 8. The premium is not the project. It is two governments adjusting their national ledgers so that one buyer may claim one tonne.

EUR 75.28. Europe's published carbon border certificate price last quarter. No conscience in sight, only law, and a price different in kind: not the cost of saving a tonne but the cost of emitting one. The ceiling the other three rungs are being pulled toward.

Read it bottom to top and a single variable moves: how much law stands behind the tonne. Not quality. Not vintage. Law.

The calendar agrees. India's CCTS is expected to start trading around October; roughly 490 industrial units already carry binding intensity targets. The old CDM, the world's first global carbon market, winds up by 31 December. Airlines face their surrender date in January 2028.

So is conscience finished? No. Around 182 million tonnes were still retired voluntarily in 2024, and quality earns its premium inside every rung. But the voluntary market has a new job now. It is the proving ground where methods get tested before some law adopts them. Conscience writes the first draft. Law does the buying.

Two years ago I began writing a carbon standard from Bengaluru on one bet: that accounting and law, not sentiment, would decide this market. The calendar is settling the bet faster than I expected.

Which of your buyers next year will be volunteers, and which will be under orders?

#CarbonMarkets #ClimateChange

[Abhimanyu Rathi @ClimateRathi]

One country cleared 92% of the old UN carbon credits that asked for a second life. India cleared none of its 460 applicants. The deadline passed seven weeks ago, and the market barely mentioned it.

The background in one minute. The Clean Development Mechanism was the world's first global carbon market, built under the Kyoto Protocol. Its successor under the Paris Agreement, the PACM, let old projects apply for a second life, provided the host government's written approval arrived by 30 June 2026.

More than 1,500 projects applied. An analysis of UN data by Climate Home News counts 415 approvals by the deadline. China and India together hosted roughly two thirds of the applicants and approved none of them. China's silence removed up to 250 million tonnes of potential issuance from the pipeline. India's removed up to 180 million. Across all applicants, over 900 million credits could have crossed, roughly the annual emissions of Japan. Most of that possibility lapsed on a Tuesday afternoon, without a statement.

Bangladesh is the counterexample. It cleared 92% of the credits requesting transition within eleven months of getting its clearance. India had held its clearance since October 2024 and let the window shut.

Was that negligence? Not necessarily. These credits were minted under rules the market now widely calls too loose, and the new mechanism recuts them hard anyway; the first transitioned issuance came out 41.5% below its old figure. And approval is the doorway to authorisation, the step where tonnes begin leaving a country's own climate ledger. So the lapse may have been quality hygiene, or ledger protection. Nobody said which. Silence was the policy.

By 31 December the mechanism itself winds up. USD 26.8 million from its trust fund is earmarked for the successor. The estate is being settled while the will is still unread.

Twenty years of argument about whether these tonnes were real, ended without a signature. No one decided. A calendar did.

#CarbonMarkets #ClimateChange

[Abhimanyu Rathi @ClimateRathi]

A number almost nobody outside carbon markets knows: 89.4% of all durable carbon removal actually delivered in Q2 2025 was biochar, by https://t.co/PT5JS31rT6's count. Not giant fans pulling carbon from the sky. Plant waste, heated without oxygen until it turns into near pure carbon, then returned to the soil.

When one method wins this decisively, a temptation follows. Approve the process instead of testing the product. Give credits because the machine ran at the right temperature, without checking whether the carbon it made will actually stay.

I trained as a chemical engineer, and my training will not let me accept that shortcut. Two machines can run at the same temperature and make very different carbon. Wet feedstock. Uneven heating. One bad batch on a good day. The temperature log records what the machine did. It says nothing about what the carbon became.

One simple lab test on the char settles it: how much hydrogen is left in it compared to carbon. Less hydrogen, tighter lock. Below a ratio of 0.7, the European Biochar Certificate cutoff, about half the carbon is still in the soil after a hundred years. Below 0.4, the research points to a thousand years and more. Above 0.7, it leaks back out, however well the machine ran.

The clean way to hold it: the temperature log is the attendance register. The lab test is the exam. Keep taking attendance, it is cheap and catches the obvious. Just never hand out a degree for it.

In the standard we are writing, the exam decides and the log only screens. The easier rule would cost projects less and bring us more registrations. Easy rules are how this market got into trouble.

So before you buy a biochar credit, one question does the work. Was the char tested, or only the machine?

#RenewCred #ClimateChange

[Abhimanyu Rathi @ClimateRathi]

#Carbon markets keep breaking one of the oldest rules in law: you cannot be judged by a rule written after your act. Courts call that basic fairness. This market calls it an update.

What does that look like in practice? A widely used avoided deforestation methodology was retired and replaced completely. The baseline, the estimate of how much forest would have been lost anyway, is no longer set by the developer. It now comes from regional risk maps built by a third party. That part is a real improvement. But projects registered under the old rules were not left alone. They were told to recalculate under the new ones. The ratings agency Calyx Global studied 15 established forest projects in Brazil under the new baselines. On average, around 40% fewer credits. Almost half faced cuts of 50% or more. Some lost 90% or more. Nothing changed in the forest. The maths changed, and it reached backward.

Now think about everyone downstream. A buyer holds a tonne that was real under the old rules and doubtful under the new ones. A developer signed contracts on numbers that a later revision quietly rewrote. The project did not fail. A rule moved after the fact.

That is the whole point. A rule you can change after the fact is not a standard. It is a negotiating position.

So should the maths never improve? It should. A standard that never updates its numbers keeps issuing credits for things we now know are not real. The fix is simple to say: freeze the deal, not the science.

That is what the Parameter Register does at #RenewCred. One list, roughly 40 numbers that decide how a tonne is counted. Only the science council can change a number, by formal vote, and I cannot override it. Every project keeps the version it signed up with, forever. New science applies to new projects. Your project keeps the rules it agreed to.

It is slower. It stops us from making our own numbers look better next year. Would the rules behind your credits survive being frozen on the day you registered?

https://t.co/3o3NujnLyI

#CarbonMarkets #ClimateChange

[Abhimanyu Rathi @ClimateRathi]

The most important experiment for carbon markets was not about carbon at all.

In a two year experiment in Gujarat, economists changed one thing about pollution audits. They stopped letting factories pick and pay their own inspector, and paid the inspector from a central pool instead. Reported pollution readings jumped 50% to 70% higher. The factories had not changed. The paymaster had.

That study, by Duflo, Greenstone, Pande and Ryan in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2013, exposed how corrupt the old arrangement was: auditors reported just 7% of plants as breaching the particulate standard when the true figure was 59%. This is not a story about bad inspectors. It is a story about who signs the cheque.

Now read how a carbon credit is verified. The developer picks the auditor. The developer pays the auditor. The auditor checks whether the paperwork follows the method. Nobody in that sentence is asked whether the tonne is real. We are told the verifier is the firewall between a claim and a credit. The firewall faces the wrong way.

We have seen this exact wiring fail before. Until 2008 the agencies that graded mortgage bonds were paid by the banks that issued them. The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission called their failures essential cogs in the wheel of financial destruction. The grades were not incompetent. They were bought.

In 2025, Coglianese and Giles at the University of Pennsylvania took 95 carbon projects already shown to be overclaiming. Every one had passed its audits. Across the 305 audits behind them, 21 of the 33 auditors approved by a registry had signed off on at least one. And Probst and colleagues, in Nature Communications, put real reductions across nearly a billion tonnes of studied credits at under 16%.

Is every overclaimed project a fraud? No. Plenty of this is honest method error; an auditor cannot check additionality a baseline never measured. But the Gujarat result will not let the market off that easily. The same auditors began finding violations the moment someone else paid them. Incentives decide which errors get caught, and which get waved through.

The fix is not better auditors. It is a different paymaster. The #RenewCred Standard runs verification through a blind pool: the project pays in, the registry assigns the examiner, and nothing issues under a qualified opinion. So here is the question worth sitting with. If your credits had to face an auditor your developer did not choose, how many tonnes would survive?

#CarbonMarkets #ClimateChange

[Abhimanyu Rathi @ClimateRathi]

One tonne of carbon can live four legal lives. Most buyers only know the first.

Life one, a voluntary credit. It retires, it makes a claim, no government touches it. The average one sold for USD 6.34 in 2024, and most still trade below USD 20.

Life two, a compliance instrument. A state recognises it against an obligation and the law sets its value.

Life three, an authorised unit. The host issues a letter of authorisation and applies a corresponding adjustment, taking the tonne off its own books so you can count it abroad. This is why Swiss authorised units have traded near USD 36 while similar voluntary credits sat at USD 5 to 8. The premium is the adjustment, not the project.

But life three is scarce. 106 bilateral arrangements exist across 53 host countries. Only seven countries have issued the letters of authorisation CORSIA buyers can actually use, in a market where airlines may need up to 236 million eligible tonnes against roughly 40 million labelled or pending. Even the UN's first issuance, a Myanmar cookstove programme, came out 41.5% below the old CDM figure once a conservative biomass value was applied.

Life four, a stranded asset. The authorisation was assumed, never confirmed, and the tonne cannot legally travel. Ask KOKO Networks in Kenya, which shut down in January 2026 and let go about 700 staff after the government declined its authorisation.

Under the Baku rulebook a host cannot unilaterally revoke authorisation after first transfer, unless its own letter reserved that right. The wording of the letter, not the label on the credit, decides whether you hold an ITMO or a wrapper.

At #RenewCred we record Article 6 status as an explicit field on every credit, with defined states.

When you last bought an authorised unit, did you read the letter of authorisation, or the marketing?

#CarbonMarkets #ClimateChange

[Abhimanyu Rathi @ClimateRathi]

https://t.co/ip7dNsYOPi

कार्बन क्रेडिट्स मानक और रजिस्ट्री कैसे काम करती है, ये जानना है, वो भी हिंदी में? तो ये देखिए।

@shekruTV @letsrenewcred
#ClimateChange #CarbonMarkets #RenewCred #India

[Abhimanyu Rathi @ClimateRathi]

Everyone's mental model of a carbon market is Europe's: a cap on total emissions, shrinking every year by law.

The largest carbon market on earth does not work that way. China's national ETS covers about 8 billion tonnes, a fifth of global emissions, on intensity benchmarks, not a cap. Steel, cement and aluminium joined last year: 1,500 more companies, coverage up from 40% to 60% of national emissions.

India's CCTS switches on the same way this year. Intensity targets for roughly 490 industrial units. First trading expected around October.

Why do giants pick benchmarks? Because you cannot put a ceiling on what is still being built. Benchmarks trade improvement. Caps trade scarcity.

The criticism is fair: under benchmarks, absolute emissions can keep rising and prices stay soft. China trades near ¥90, a fraction of Europe's price. If the story ended there, benchmark markets would be theatre.

Watch the sequence instead. China has published a roadmap to convert to an absolute cap by 2027, after six years of building the measurement layer underneath: entity level MRV, verified baselines, allocation data. Benchmark first, so a country learns to count. Cap second, when counting starts to bind.

India begins counting at compliance grade in 2026. The two open questions worth arguing about: can it match China's pace, and is it already late to the party?

Because the stage that matters is not the price. It is whether the counting is built to survive a cap.

Independence Day in India today. Sovereignty in carbon starts the unglamorous way: as bookkeeping.

#ClimateChange #RenewCred

[Shekru\शेकरू @shekruTV]

With #2dot0 #Farms
#Biochar #Series 19
#The #RenewCred #Standard #Version 1.0
#Public #Consultation #Period
@ClimateRathi
#Founder
#RenewCred
15/8 7pm
in #Hindi
#बायोचार #मालिका १९
#रेन्यूक्रेड #प्रमाण #आवृत्ती १.०
अभिमन्यू राठी
#संस्थापक
#रेन्यूक्रेड
१५/८ सायं ७वा
#माध्यम #हिंदी

[Abhimanyu Rathi @ClimateRathi]

CBAM prices the unmeasured at the average plus a markup: 10% in 2026, 20% in 2027, 30% from 2028. India's CCTS earns no discount at the border. Verified data at the source is the whole game. That is the muscle @letsrenewcred's Net Zero platform builds.

https://t.co/2NxYTNOAsb

[Abhimanyu Rathi @ClimateRathi]

30 days ago we published every equation in our carbon standard and invited the world to attack it. The window closes tonight at midnight IST.

The hardest part was publishing the parameter register: roughly 40 numbers that decide how many credits a project earns. No black box left to hide behind.

A carbon credit is a claim that something invisible happened. Rules that cannot survive public interrogation do not deserve the market's trust.

Final hours, if you hold a view: https://t.co/eTM3mZ4bes

#CarbonCredits #ClimateChange #RenewCred

[Shekru\शेकरू @shekruTV]

With #2dot0 #Farms
#Biochar #Series 19
#The #RenewCred #Standard #Version 1.0
#Public #Consultation #Period
@ClimateRathi
#Founder #CEO
#RenewCred
1/8 7pm
#बायोचार #मालिका १९
#रेन्यूक्रेड #प्रमाण #आवृत्ती १.०
अभिमन्यू राठी
#संस्थापक #कार्यकारी #अधिकारी
#रेन्यूक्रेड
१/८ सायं ७ वा

[RenewCred @letsrenewcred]

The carbon credit market has been defined by opacity. Credits without rigorous verification. Communities left out. At #RenewCred, we believe trust needs architecture: science, technology, transparency, and Global South leadership.

https://t.co/IHRXhAurv3

#WorldEnvironmentDay

[Abhimanyu Rathi @ClimateRathi]

.@Google boss, your new gdrive notification icon is very similar to @Airbnb. Just ended up asking my wife if she booked a vacation, figured out it was the sales team commenting on revenue items. Such is life.

[Abhimanyu Rathi @ClimateRathi]

Traditional voluntary carbon market infrastructure charges the project before liquidity. RenewCred charges at liquidity. Project developer enters with lower upfront carbon market friction, and RenewCred recovers registry, assurance, and dMRV related costs when the credit is sold.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

You don't know how big a fish you are till you try a big pond.

[Abhimanyu Rathi @ClimateRathi]

Just attend a 'Climate Party' in #Bengaluru on the topic of Carbon Markets. Led by consultants, the 3-hr session quickly turned into a comedy act. Lessons: practioners > consultants, structured tempo > random chats, don't pay for a one off session & networking adds to confusion.