Voluntary Registry Offsets Database
The database, developed by the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project, contains all carbon offset projects, credit issuances, and credit retirements listed globally by four major voluntary offset project registries—American Carbon Registry (ACR), Climate Action Reserve (CAR), Gold Standard, and Verra (VCS). These four registries generate almost all of the world's voluntary market offsets and also include credits eligible for use under the California / Quebec linked cap-and-trade programs and Washington's cap-and-invest program.
This database is meant to increase the transparency of the carbon offset market, providing researchers and offset buyers with the ability to better see offset credits and projects in a single database. Dynamic charts and tools allow users to see trends over time, and explore the projects and credits on the market by location, type, registry, etc.
Download the Voluntary Registry Offsets Database v10
Download v10 with data through December 31, 2023 by clicking the above link.
The database should automatically download an Excel sheet. If it opens in GoogleSheets we recommend downloading it as an Excel sheet.
Released under Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license. If you wish to use, adapt, or reference this material, please cite as: Barbara K. Haya, Aline Abayo, Ivy S. So., Micah Elias. (2023, December). Voluntary Registry Offsets Database v10, Berkeley Carbon Trading Project, University of California, Berkeley. By clicking the above link you agree not to sell the database in full or part without attribution, and otherwise to cite the database according to the Create Commons Attribution terms.
Supporting documents
Change log
Details on how we calculate issuances, retirements, buffer pool deposits, and reversals by registry
Scopes & types descriptions
Version archive:
- v9 - with data through Nov 1, 2023
- v8 - with data through May 10, 2023
- v7 - 2022 year end version - with data through December 31, 2022
- v6 with data through November 9, 2022
- v5 with data through March 31, 2022
- v4 - 2021 year end version - with data through December 31, 2021
- v3 with data through November 24, 2021
- v2 with data through May 3, 2021
- v1 with data through December 8, 2020
Offset quality and trends
Please see Berkeley Carbon Trading Project's main page for more on some of the quality challenges with major offset project types and offset registry protocol-development processes.
Published commentaries:
May 2022, by Carbon Direct, Assessing the State of the Voluntary Carbon Market in 2022
April 2021, by Carbon Direct, Breakdown of credits by type, disentangling mitigation and storage type, and tracking the surplus of old credits. Comments by Eli Mitchell-Larson (University of Oxford, Carbon Direct) and Tim Bushman (Carbon Direct) Published with the first release of the database.
Sign up for updates
Please provide your email address if you would like to be notified of database updates. We also welcome any suggestions for future updates, would be grateful for data corrections, and will try to answer any questions. You can also use this form to sign up for updates from the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project.
Donate to the project
We gratefully welcome donations to support our ongoing work. Please specify whether your tax deductable gift is for the Voluntary Registry Offsets Database or research at the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project, and please include "fund# 45162".