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Leverage our leadership in industry standards for climate investment

Our Carbon Project Ratings represent in-depth and consistent assessments of individual projects using rules-based, project-type specific frameworks. Our ratings feature transparent scoring of six key criteria, including the market’s only in-depth assessment of legal and ethical risk.

Each carbon project receives an intuitive composite rating from AAA to CCC that leverages investment-quality data and cutting-edge geospatial analytics. Our ratings combine the detailed carbon credit integrity assessment system developed since 2021 by Trove Research with MSCI’s decades of experience in producing investment-grade sustainability research and ratings.


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Features - Carbon Project Ratings

Why leading institutions use our Carbon Project Ratings

Companies, investors, traders and developers around the world use MSCI’s Carbon Project Ratings to quickly identify and understand risk and drive impact.

Depth and breadth of coverage

Search and compare carbon credit integrity across more than 4,000 projects.3

Assess integrity holistically across six essential criteria — additionality, quantification, permanence, co-benefits, legal and ethical risks (including financial crime, corruption, fraud and sanctions), and delivery risk.

Ratings cover both registered and pre-registration projects, across all major project types, including fast-growing sectors such as jurisdictional REDD+ and engineered carbon removal solutions.

Transparent, objective, and rigorous

Our carbon project ratings leverage the best of advanced data science, geospatial analytics, and technological-economic modeling to provide clear and actionable insights. We apply institutional-standard data quality and verification standards to raise the integrity bar.

Our proprietary methodologies are underpinned by scientific principles and industry frameworks, grounded in granularity, and incorporate advanced, AI-powered calculation tools for precision and reliability. We provide transparency with detailed documentation of our methodologies and client access to our analysts.

Considers risk from all angles

Our composite ratings consider not only the integrity of a project’s environmental impact but also its co-benefits, delivery risks, and legal and ethical characteristics. Detailed country policy and corresponding adjustment risk analysis is also available on our platform.

Our platform allows subscribers to customize the weightings of different factors to quickly identify projects that best meet their preferences.

Backed by geospatial intelligence

Assess project-level integrity with transparent integrity scoring based on more than 1 million datapoints, 20,000 project documents, and more than 3,000 geospatial boundaries.

Analyze deforestation trends, measure carbon stock, and understand biodiversity impacts and benefits based on the geography of project areas with our suite of geospatial tools.


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MSCI Carbon Project Ratings

Raise the bar on carbon project integrity. Elevate your strategy with a new generation of ratings that leverage over two decades of experience in analyzing carbon markets and rating the financial risks and impacts of sustainability.

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Get a glimpse of our data

We are making our Carbon Project Ratings publicly available for the rest of 2024. See how we are raising the bar on carbon project ratings and enhancing clarity in the carbon credit market. To see more of the analysis and findings behind the ratings, get in touch.


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Methodology - Carbon Project Ratings

Explore our methodology

Our Carbon Project Ratings Methodology describes in detail the framework and criteria we use to define carbon project integrity.

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Footnotes - Carbon Project Ratings

  • 1 As of Sept. 15, 2024
  • 2 Following MSCI’s acquisition of Trove Research in 2023
  • 3 As of Sept. 18, 2024