Draft VCM+ Action Agenda

About the VCM+ Action Agenda

The VCM+ Action Agenda was developed through a structured consultation with VCM+ Coalition members—scientists, standard-setters, buyers, community leaders, investors, developers, philanthropies, NGOs, and others working across the market. Members were asked to identify the issues they see as most important for the market to address to achieve integrity and scale. Those inputs were synthesized against a clear set of criteria. The Coalition prioritized issues that:

 

• materially constrain confidence, interoperability, investment, or scale if left unresolved;

• require coordination across market stakeholders to solve; and

• lend themselves to concrete solutions that can be developed, tested, and embedded in existing institutions.

 

The result is a focused set of action items with defined outcomes organized under the Coalition's five pillars. The action items are at different stages of development. Some are already well under way, advanced by established groups with strong momentum and clear ownership. Others are in progress but fragmented, where greater coordination across parallel efforts could accelerate impact. And some represent clear gaps—important work that is not yet being addressed and where new effort is needed to move forward. 
 

How the Action Agenda Will Be Used

The Action Agenda is first and foremost a market-organizing tool. It is intended to give members, partners, and the broader market a shared map of the priority work ahead—one that participants can use to shape their own strategies, find aligned efforts to join, and identify where their contributions are most needed. By making priorities legible across the system, the Action Agenda is designed to reduce duplication, encourage collaboration, streamline communications about market reform, accelerate collective impact, and clarify priorities for funders looking to deploy catalytic capital.

 

The Action Agenda also informs the VCM+ Coalition's annual work plan. The Coalition will not take on every action item directly. Where strong work is already under way, the Coalition's role is to amplify, connect, and support the groups already leading. Where there are clear gaps and a need for coordination, the Coalition will establish time-bound, expert-led sprints to develop solutions, paired with piloting and policy engagement to ensure those solutions land in durable market infrastructure.

 

By design, every action item is framed as a time-bound deliverable with a clearly defined outcome that can be evaluated as complete or incomplete within a finite window. Each is intended to feed into the policies, institutional processes, and standards that govern the market—standard-setting bodies, regulatory frameworks, registries, and accounting and assurance systems. The Action Agenda itself intentionally stops short of policy implementation. Implementation is the responsibility of the institutions that own those policies, standards, and processes, and the Action Agenda is designed to give them what they need to act. Alongside the Action Agenda, the Coalition will develop a separate policy engagement strategy that sets out how it will work with these institutions to support uptake of Action Agenda outputs into formal rules, guidance, and systems.

 

The Action Agenda will be publicly released at London Climate Action Week 2026 and updated biannually to reflect progress, new learning, and emerging market needs. As actions are completed, priorities shift, and the market evolves, the Action Agenda will evolve with it—anchoring a shared, public conversation about what high-integrity carbon markets require and how the system can deliver for climate, communities, and nature.