Market perspective
2025 in review: the year compliance demand became visible
December 2025 · AGCF Team
If 2024 was the year the rules were finished, 2025 was the year the market began behaving as if they mattered. Between the COP in Baku that completed the Article 6 rulebook and the COP in Belém a year later, the centre of gravity in carbon markets shifted perceptibly from voluntary sentiment toward regulated obligation.
Positioning ahead of the first wave
Three currents defined the year. First, preparation for CORSIA: with Phase 1 obligations accruing against the 85%-of-2019 baseline, airlines and intermediaries spent 2025 sizing their exposure and beginning to secure eligible supply. Second, host-country machinery: governments worked through the practicalities of authorising credits for international transfer — deliberately, and in most cases slowly. Third, a supply response: credit issuances accelerated into the final months of the year as developers positioned inventory ahead of expected compliance demand.
Quality kept diverging
Beneath the headline volumes, the market continued to split. Credits with recognised integrity labels, compliance eligibility or host-country authorisation held or gained value; commodity-grade credits without those attributes continued to languish. The lesson of the post-2023 integrity reckoning has become structural: buyers no longer purchase “carbon credits” in the abstract — they purchase specific attributes.
Our perspective
Entering 2026, the fundamental asymmetry we have built AGCF around remains intact: regulation is manufacturing demand on a schedule, while high-integrity, compliance-eligible supply is authorised project by project, country by country. Years like 2025 — quiet on the surface, structural underneath — are when positioning matters most.