explainer
What is a carbon credit?
Carbon credits are the universal accounting unit of climate action — one credit = one tonne of CO₂ avoided or removed from the atmosphere. This explainer walks through where they come from, who issues them, and how to spot the real ones.
The 60-second answer
A carbon credit is a tradable certificate representing one tonne of carbon dioxide either avoided (kept out of the atmosphere) or removed (taken back out of it). One credit = one tonne. That equivalence is the entire reason carbon markets exist — it's what lets a forester in Brazil, an industrial facility in Germany, and a traveller booking a hotel in Tokyo speak the same financial language about climate.
Credits are issued by registries — Verra, Gold Standard, ACR, CAR, and Plan Vivo are the five that dominate the voluntary market. Each registry maintains its own methodology library (the technical rules for what qualifies as a credit) and its own public ledger of issued, transferred, and retired credits. Buying a credit moves it on the registry's books; retiring a credit removes it from circulation permanently against a specific claim, like 'we offset our hotel booking on 23 May 2026.'
Where the tonnes come from
A carbon credit can represent two very different things — and treating them as interchangeable is one of the worst habits in corporate climate accounting.
Avoidance credits come from projects that prevent emissions that would otherwise have happened. The classic example is REDD+ — paying a forest community not to clear land they had legal right to clear. Other avoidance projects: renewable energy in grids that would otherwise have burned coal, methane capture from landfill, efficient cookstoves replacing open fires. Avoidance credits dominate volume — about 80% of voluntary-market issuance — but they're the ones with the most criticism around 'additionality' (would the emission really have happened without the credit?).
Removal credits come from projects that pull CO₂ out of the air and store it. Tree-planting (afforestation), biochar, mangrove restoration, soil-carbon sequestration via regenerative agriculture, and engineered solutions like Direct Air Capture all fall here. Removals are usually more expensive — DAC currently sits at $400-700/tonne — but they don't have the additionality problem because the carbon physically isn't in the air anymore.
How the price gets set
Carbon-credit prices vary by three orders of magnitude. A 2026 REDD+ forestry credit might trade at $4. A Verra biochar credit might trade at $80. A Climeworks DAC removal sits around $600. The spread reflects real differences in permanence (does the carbon stay locked away?), additionality (would it have happened anyway?), co-benefits (does the project also help biodiversity, water, jobs?), and risk of reversal (could the forest burn?).
The compliance market — the EU ETS in particular — sits in a different price band entirely, around €70-100 per allowance. Compliance and voluntary credits are not fungible. An EU power plant cannot use a Verra forestry credit to settle its ETS obligation, and a hotel chain offsetting its corporate emissions does not affect the supply of EU allowances.
What IMPT does
When you book a hotel through the IMPT app, we purchase one verified credit from a Verra- or Gold Standard-listed project and retire it against your booking reference. The retirement is recorded on-chain, queryable by booking ID, and tied to the credit's serial number on the underlying registry. We default to a credit mix weighted toward removals — currently biochar and mangrove restoration — because those tonnes do not depend on counterfactual reasoning to be real.
One tonne is roughly 33 nights' worth of average hotel-stay emissions (≈30 kg of CO₂ per night). It is not a flight offset, and it does not pretend to be — for long-haul travel the dominant emission source is almost always the plane, not the hotel. We retire the tonne anyway because it's the cleanest accounting unit, and the hotel-night carbon ledger is one of the few we can actually run automatically.
How to verify a credit yourself
Every retired credit on Verra or Gold Standard has a public registry URL. The retirement record shows the project, the vintage (when the tonne was avoided or removed), the methodology used, the date of retirement, and the beneficiary. If a 'carbon offset' product does not let you trace your specific retirement to a registry serial number, it isn't really a credit — it's a marketing line. That's the test.
Book a hotel — one tonne of CO₂ retired automatically.
Every IMPT hotel booking retires one Verra- or Gold Standard-listed carbon credit on your behalf. No add-on fee, no upsell, no catalogue. Just verified, on-chain retirement.