A buyer’s guide to inset credits
Five questions procurement and sustainability teams should ask before bringing a new instrument into the portfolio.
Buying an inset credit should feel closer to buying a financial instrument than buying a badge. The questions are practical: what happened, how do we know, and what exactly are we entitled to say?
Start with the intervention. Is it inside the relevant value chain? Is the emissions boundary clear? Then examine evidence: who verified the activity, what methodology was used, and can the data be followed from project to allocation?
Finally, understand the claim. An instrument can support a company’s transition without erasing its gross emissions. Precision is a strength, not a limitation.
A good buyer leaves the process with fewer assumptions and a better map of the work still to do.