Earlier this year, RMI released the Carbon Crediting Data Framework (CCDF), the first open-source framework designed to standardize carbon credit project data across its crediting journey.

Within the 570 fields that make up the CCDF, 368 fields (organized into 9 categories and 24 subcategories) focus on socio-environmental (SE) considerations (see Box 1), which are the non-carbon attributes that determine the project’s long-term success, especially its impact on communities, ecosystems, and overall climate resilience.

In this article, we spotlight both the range and scope of the SE data in the CCDF and early examples of market actors that are implementing or adapting the framework.

Why socio-environmental data?

While standalone emissions data can tell you to what extent greenhouse gases were reduced or removed, SE data explains how and why that impact matters to the people and ecosystems that enable project activities.

Without SE data, carbon credit projects risk overstating or under-accounting their impact, as buyers, policymakers, and communities are left without critical context to judge whether a project delivers on its broader promises. When integrated, SE and carbon data transform crediting projects from a one-dimensional commodity into a multi-dimensional climate solution — and facilitate improved market interactions regarding SE data.

While we encourage full adoption of the CCDF, we heard in interviews and consultations with project developers, standards bodies, ratings agencies, and other industry experts that the SE portion is especially valuable for those looking beyond emissions when evaluating carbon credit projects because the current market guidance is vague, very fragmented, and a burden to consolidate.

We are releasing standalone technical documentation, which highlights only the SE components of the broader CCDF. This specialized toolkit is curated to present VCM actors with the tools to embed SE data collection and best practices into their crediting projects or market-supporting processes.

At their core, carbon credit projects involve intervening in dynamic social and ecological systems to avoid, reduce, or remove emissions. These credits don’t exist in a vacuum — they’re generated through real interventions in living landscapes and communities. Socio-environmental data thus covers all aspects of a carbon credit project beyond its emissions impacts.

Social factors include data regarding human rights, involvement of indigenous peoples and local communities, gender protections and inclusion, and benefit sharing with the community carrying out the project activities. Environmental data covers how the project interacts with nearby biodiversity, water systems, air quality, and soil or ecosystem health.

SE considerations are continually intersecting with one another, ultimately dictating the success of the carbon credit project — meaning the overall implementation of SE components can make or break the project.

Projects that fail to implement, measure, and account for SE considerations risk undermining the durability, permanence, and long-term feasibility of the credits produced, since without proper SE safeguards, projects have the potential to exploit, displace, and fracture the communities and ecosystems of operation.

On the flip side, projects that are designed to uplift and reinvest in the communities and ecosystems they operate within have immense potential to deliver lasting benefits, as the local community receives financial or other benefits from project implementation and is incentivized to sustain project activities.

Buyers, financiers, and investors in the VCM are actively prioritizing SE considerations in their decisions. Buyers are consistently expressing interest in projects that align with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs, see Box 1 above) and are comparing projects based on how well these benefits are monitored, verified, and reported.

According to research from the American Forest Foundation, 29 percent of carbon credits buyers evaluate projects based on co-benefits. In the broader market, projects working towards the SDGs demonstrate price premiums that are 86 percent higher than projects not associated with SDGs.

The VCM currently has no shortage of carbon-focused materials: from emissions accounting resources, methodologies, and quality guidance — a topic that RMI's Carbon Markets Initiative is actively working to address . Unfortunately, the landscape of SE data is far more fractured, undefined, and confusing (see section 3.2 of the CCDF report).

All VCM registries require projects to declare that their activities will not actively harm the local community or ecosystem — often using a checklist or declarative statement to confirm compliance with the do-no-harm policies (see Box 1).

If the registries request more than a do-no-harm disclosure, they do so in a manner that is generalized and inconsistent, meaning each registry uses different questions, and answer formats, to assess compliance.

The VCM registries provide little guidance to help projects understand how best to collect, document, quantify, and characterize their SE-related activities and impacts. If projects want to quantify and document their SE impacts, they need to independently piece together the relevant best practice frameworks from outside the VCM and adapt them to their projects.

The result is a confusing maze of guidance for how, to what extent, and with what measurement procedures projects can or should incorporate SE components into their efforts. This maze leaves SE considerations scattered in rigor across different standards, hard to quantify or verify, and thus hard to compare across project types.

On top of this, SE data is often placed behind paywalls, kept “proprietary,” or scattered across dozens of rulebooks, guidance documents, policies, and recommended best practices. This hinders the ability of market actors, but particularly project developers, from developing a clear and comprehensive understanding of what information they need to provide when, in what format, and to whom to best demonstrate the full impact of their projects.

Our team synthesized data-related guidance from 140 sources, spanning multilateral development banks’ safeguards to best practices for emerging biodiversity or gender credits, to categorize, standardize, and integrate the SE data points that can be attached to crediting projects into the CCDF. See Chapter 3.2 in the CCDF report to dive into the details of our process and design principles.

Overall, we created a framework with SE fields that is helping market actors change how they interact with SE data in a manner that is more transparent, comprehensive, standardized, and intuitive.

Specifically, Centigrade, a data utility, has digitized the CCDF and is using the SE fields to help project developers collect, report, digitize, and showcase data-driven stories about the community and economic impacts of their projects. An illustrative example of this approach comes from the Proyecto Mirador Foundation, which is using the Centigrade platform to document SE impacts generated by their project to expand clean cookstoves in Honduras.

Meanwhile, the Open Carbon Protocol, an open-source registry, has incorporated the CCDF’s SE fields into its safeguards, ensuring that all registered projects are adhering to guidelines that enable high-quality credits, while enhancing local communities and ecosystems.

Here’s how the SE fields of the CCDF are promoting market changes:

Transparent and integrated to enhance and strengthen current guidance

When we designed the CCDF, we decided to build it by synthesizing the existing guidance into one space, standardizing it where possible, and publishing it as a public, open-source toolkit. To learn more about how we built, designed, and structured the CCDF toolkit, read our full report. While we recommend using the full framework to avoid the segregation of crucial data as discussed above, we learned in our research that a growing number of market actors are interested specifically in how this tool can be used to further their equity goals and enhance safeguard protocols — specifically because the current market guidance on this is so fragmented and confusing.

For this reason, we decided to create a separate technical implementation toolkit (complete with an implementation spreadsheet, JSON, and Markdown) just for the SE portions of the CCDF. This implementation toolkit is designed so that each market actor can integrate the relevant data components into their existing guidance or processes to ensure the SE considerations can be reported, measured, and analyzed with the same transparency and granularity as other aspects of project design.

For example, the Open Carbon Protocol (OCP) recently upgraded its approach to safeguards and co-benefits to align with the due diligence components of the CCDF. After reviewing the SE fields in the CCDF and the sources it was informed by, OCP updated its safeguards to cover a wide array of socio-environmental considerations, with specific guidance on the types of information to substantiate each safeguard.

Crucially, OCP’s safeguards include specific guidance, based on this work, which outlines considerations like free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) principles, how to safeguard environmental resources like water, soil, and air quality, and how projects can go beyond “do no harm” to create co-benefits. With these robust safeguards, OCP ensures that all registered projects are adhering to guidelines that enable high-quality credits, while enhancing local communities and ecosystems.

Comprehensive, providing a clear structure for granular prompts

The SE portion of the CCDF synthesizes nearly 140 sources to provide a framework that organizes data based on where it is most relevant to its crediting process and that goes into more detail than the market’s existing requirements.

First, all CCDF fields are organized in a tiered system, tied to where the project is in its crediting journey (See Exhibit 1). Tier 0 is methodology-agnostic, focusing on pre-registration data, to establish foundational expectations for the do-no-harm principles, human rights law, and widely accepted safeguards about how the project expects to uphold these safeguards.

Tier 2 focuses on actual data, once the project is operational. It invites projects to demonstrate the collected and verified data behind real-world co-benefits, like job creation, improved water access, or enhanced ecosystem connectivity. For example, where Tier 0 asks about benefit-sharing plans, Tier 2 fields dig deeper, requiring evidence of benefit distribution, frequency, and the tangible impacts on vulnerable communities.

Overall, the SE considerations in the CCDF cover over 360 distinct fields across 9 categories and 24 subcategories, including several typically excluded from the current VCM frameworks, such as impacts on archeological and cultural heritage, consequential development, and noise pollution (See Exhibit 1). To see every field, reference our SE CCDF technical documentation.

Exhibit 1: Socio-environmental Fields of the CCDF

TIER 0 Pre-Registration	TIER 1 Validation Status	TIER 2 Verification Status	TIER 3 Innovation & Ambition
Disclosures Organization Overview Location Compliance Labor Rights Carbon Rights Socio-Economic Due Diligence Involuntary Displacement Stakeholder Analysis Benefits Sharing Ecological Due Diligence Air Quality Biodiversity Soil Health Water Quality and Availability	Risk Management Durability	Durability Status of Reversal Events Socio-Economic Impacts Involuntary Displacement Stakeholder Participation Workforce and Capacity Building Impacts Economic, Fiscal, and Benefits Sharing Impacts Health and Sanitation Ecological Impacts Air Quality Impacts Water Quality Impacts Water Availability Impacts Biodiversity Impacts Soil Impacts Marine and Coastal Health Noise Pollution Consequential Development Impacts	Sustainable Development Goals SDGs Supported by the Project Key Differentiators* Specialized Core Benefits Certifications (e.g., gender credits, biodiversity credits, water credits, etc.) Citizen Science Initiatives Innovations in MRV Advanced Risk Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies Climate Finance Innovation Novel Technologies

Note:*Tier 3 is open-ended; the CCDF is designed to accommodate innovations in data and quality that are specific to individual projects. The list above provides examples of the types of data categories that may be included in Tier 3.

The SE fields in the CCDF capture more detail than the current market guidance. For example, the standard practice is for projects to disclose whether they plan to operate with a grievance mechanism — a way for stakeholders to formally submit concerns about project activities.

Projects are rarely asked to report specific details about how a grievance mechanism is operated or managed once the project is implemented. Our framework provides the fields, formats, and structure to go into these details: we ask how grievance mechanisms are communicated to respective parties, whether they are publicly available, the status and actions taken to remedy logged concerns, and a prompt to upload relevant proof of claims.

All told, the CCDF’s tiered structure and its data granularity ensures it pulls back the curtain to showcase which projects have robust monitoring, verification, and reporting practices to demonstrate on-the-ground impacts and which ones do not. To explore how projects are utilizing SE fields, browse available listings on Centigrade.

Standardized data formats to enable efficient data exchange

The specific SE CCDF toolkit also provides consistent guidance on the format and metadata that all answers can provide. Specifically, each field has four metadata tags to ensure answers are provided consistently and in a format that facilitates the efficient exchange of information.

Depending on the information being sought, allowed formats include single or multi-select dropdowns with pre-defined options, file upload, text inputs, text areas, and more. Each data field is also accompanied by a description to give further insight, source references, and detail to ensure specific data points can be placed in the proper context. To see how this looks in practice, see below for a selection of non-monetary benefit sharing fields in Tier 2 (Exhibit 2).

For more details on metadata tags in the CCDF, see Chapter 4 in our CCDF report. To learn about how our implementing partner, Centigrade, has transformed these fields into a functional, easy-to-use platform, see Chapter 5 of the CCDF report.

Exhibit 2: Examples of Non-Monetary Benefit Sharing Fields in Tier 2

Label	Description	Type	Options
The project engages in benefit sharing aside from financial payments	Examples of non-financial benefits can include the sharing of products or goods, technology transfer, and/or local infrastructure improvements	Boolean	N/A
Non-monetary benefits implemented by the project activity	Non-monetary payment types adapted from definitions within the UN Nagoya Protocol	Array	Tax abatements Sharing of research and development results Scientific collaboration and/or joint publication Development of citizen science skills Institutional and professional relationships Organic material transfer (e.g., Biochar, compost) Language skill development Local infrastructure improvements Technology transfer Other
Description of non-monetary benefit sharing activities	High level summary of benefits shared that are not provided as an exchange of money	String	N/A
Non-monetary benefit sharing supporting documents	Evidence of agreement and distribution of non-monetary benefits	Array	N/A

Intuitively designed to easily substantiate SE claims

Across the VCM, “co-benefits” are frequently referenced and often leveraged to claim SDG alignment or used as key metrics to construct compelling impact narratives. Due to the VCM-wide data fragmentation issues discussed above, it has been very difficult for VCM actors to exchange, analyze, or substantiate the data that underpins these SE claims. The SE fields in the CCDF are built to help projects bring credibility and integrity to their claims.

For example, a subset of these fields asks projects to document their progress towards relevant SDG goals, targets, and indicators. Centigrade, in digitizing the CCDF, transformed these fields into a digestible table — with space for projects to report on the specific impact data that underpin progress towards each SDG indicator (see Exhibit 3). This table also allows projects to specify the monitoring approach for each indicator and provide specific verification data (reports, audits, or other documents) to back up the claim.

Below you can see an illustrative example of how Proyecto Mirador is using this SDG table to demonstrate the specific data that justify their SDG impacts. The full SDG table, showing data for all nine relevant SDG indicators, plus the project’s full data using the digitized SE fields of the CCDF, can be viewed on Proyecto Mirador’s listing on Centigrade.

Exhibit 3: Illustrative Example of Proyecto Mirador’s data and SDG indicators on Centigrade

The SE components of the framework are designed to be expanded and iterated upon, particularly in contexts where robust, standardized social and environmental data and guidance are needed to improve credit assessment and quality.

As it stands, this tool helps buyers and brokers make more informed procurement decisions by clarifying which data points to look for and helps project developers showcase the full suite of their impacts on local communities and ecosystems. This ensures all market actors gain access to the standardized, transparent, and robust data need to accurately price crediting projects based on their collective climate impact.

To learn more about this work, we invite you to watch our CCDF webinar series, starting with our video explainer.

You can also hear directly from our early users and implementers, and join us for our final webinar in this series which will dive deeper into the SE aspects of the framework in October.

To learn more about this work, we invite you to join our CCDF webinar series taking place in September and October, with recordings soon to be available on demand. We look forward to receiving feedback, collaboration requests, and suggestions on how to expand and strengthen the SE portions of the CCDF. Please reach out to us at carbonmarkets@rmi.org.