Every fortnight or so, someone — usually a procurement lead at a Tier 2 brand we're talking to — asks us a version of: "what's the difference between Verra and Plan Vivo, and which one is the strict one?" The short answer is that they're checking different things. The long answer is what this article is about.
I want this to be useful for someone who has been handed a sustainability brief and is now staring at a six-page verification document wondering which paragraph their auditor will actually flag. So I'm going to skip the marketing language and the carbon-market history lesson, and just walk through what each standard checks, what it doesn't, and how to read the documents that come out the other end.
Three different things often get bundled into the word "verified":
When someone says "our offsets are Verra-verified," the useful follow-up question is: "validated, verified, or both — and as of when?" An expired verification report is not a useful artefact.
"The phrase 'verified offset' carries less information than people think. The phrase 'verified to VCS standard, third-party audited Q4 2025, by SCS Global Services' carries the information you actually want."
The largest voluntary carbon standard by volume. Strong on methodology rigour for forestry and avoided-deforestation projects. Has been through reputational pressure in 2023–24 and tightened its rules accordingly. Best for: large, well-established projects (e.g. our Tanzania flagship). Weaker for: small community projects where the audit overhead is prohibitive.
Smaller standard, but the one most respected for community-led and smallholder agroforestry. Emphasises social outcomes and benefit-sharing. Best for: Haiti, Senegal — projects where the household income side matters as much as the tonne count.
UK-government-backed standard for native woodland creation. Conservative, well-documented, and recognised in UK ESG reporting frameworks. Best for: Atlas Park, Mersey Forest, and other UK projects. Not applicable outside the UK.
Multi-domain standard with strong SDG alignment requirements. Frequently used for projects where the social outcome is the primary case. Best for: paired-impact programmes where reporting on multiple SDGs is essential.
Audit body, audit date, project scope. If any of those three is missing or vague, ask for the full report — not the summary.
If you have a verification letter on your desk and a procurement deadline tomorrow, here's the actual order:
The thing every procurement lead eventually finds out: verification is not a moral judgment on the project. It's a quality check against a specific methodology. Verification doesn't tell you:
So a "verified" project is a necessary condition for procurement, not a sufficient one. Use the verification to filter out the obviously-bad. Then use the project's own field reporting, partner relationships and history to decide what to actually fund.
If you want to see real, anonymised verification letters for the More Trees portfolio — and a written narrative of how to read each one — request the verification pack. We send it out routinely to procurement and ESG leads ahead of compliance season.
A walk through our newest project in central Senegal — peanut monocropping, women's cooperatives, and what the SDG numbers actually look like on a farm.
Three fire years, 1.3M hectares. Why we plant in November–December, and what "assisting natural regeneration" really means on the ground.
The standards we follow, the audit cadence, and the field-level data we publish. The reference page behind this article.
