By Gemma Torras Vives
When countries move into carbon markets, the challenge is rarely conceptual. It is operational. Key questions quickly emerge:
- How do you track mitigation outcomes across sectors?
- How do you align with national policy frameworks and Article 6 requirements?
- How do you manage transactions in a way that is secure, transparent, and aligned with international expectations?
- How do you ensure that all these components—from data generation to final transaction—work seamlessly together as one system?
These questions point to the same issue: infrastructure—the systems, platforms, rules, and data flows that determine whether markets can function, connect, and be trusted.
The approach of the World Bank Group is to focus on how these systems are designed and implemented in practice—working with countries while aligning efforts across the broader market ecosystem.
Identifying where systems break down
Across countries, similar friction points tend to emerge:
- Unclear roles between institutions managing registries, MRV, and authorizations
- Systems that are secure individually but not designed to interact with others
- Data that cannot be easily shared or verified across platforms
- Disconnects between MRV systems and registries
- Transaction processes that lack basic safeguards
These are not marginal issues. They directly affect whether systems can process transactions, support policy implementation, and connect to international markets.
To address them, the Carbon Markets Infrastructure Working Group (CMI WG) - a broad group of public and private actors, including the World Bank Group – identified where systems fail in real-world use and set out concrete actions to make them function together. The results are a set of technical guidance notes that provide practical tools, shared standards, and actionable recommendations.
The CMI WG’s work is now feeding into wider efforts, including the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market’s (ICVCM) Continuous Improvement Work Program on Digital MRV.
A core set of technical requirements
The technical guidance notes define a set of priority areas that are essential for designing and operating functional carbon market systems in practice:
- Governance : clear roles and accountability—who operates, who verifies, who authorizes.
- Transaction integrity : basic financial controls embedded in how transactions are processed.
- Information security : data protection and system resilience built in from the start.
- Interoperability : systems that can exchange data across jurisdictions and platforms.
- Digital MRV : reliable, increasingly automated data feeding into registries.
As carbon markets evolve, these systems are expected to support more complex operations and a broader range of market participants. In this context, emerging approaches are beginning to incorporate features such as clearer tracking of legal title, enhanced audit trails, and stronger transaction accountability. These developments point toward more standardized and scalable market infrastructure, while still requiring strong alignment with core integrity and governance principles.
From spreadsheets to connected systems: building across the ecosystem
A practical shift is already underway. Countries are moving from fragmented tools—often spreadsheet-based—toward integrated digital systems where MRV, registries, and transaction layers are connected and operate as part of a single architecture.
This transition enables more consistent and auditable tracking, clearer oversight of carbon assets, and systems that can interface with international markets. It also supports a shift from project-level accounting toward managing carbon outcomes at a broader, system level.
Delivering this requires coordination across the ecosystem. A key part of the approach has been to work across governments, standards bodies, private platforms, and technical partners. The objective is pragmatic: reduce fragmentation, align expectations, and ensure that systems developed in different contexts can interoperate.
This becomes critical as countries engage simultaneously with domestic systems, voluntary markets, and Article 6 mechanisms—often navigating overlapping, but not fully harmonized, requirements.
A recent podcast hosted by our partners the Article 6 Implementation Partnership (A6IP) further explores how countries and practitioners are navigating this transition.
Rolling this out: from guidance to implementation
Demand from countries is becoming more specific. The focus is shifting toward designing and deploying systems that work in practice and connect to international markets.
For example, in Indonesia, efforts have focused on coordinating multiple partners across registry and MRV development, aligning data models for an Article 6 registry, and ensuring that sector-level systems evolve as part of a coherent, integrated architecture rather than in isolation. In Bhutan, early clarity on institutional roles—defining the registry administrator and operator within the policy framework—has enabled more streamlined system development and stronger cross-ministerial coordination. In India, establishing a core interoperable data foundation—drawing on formats such as the UNFCCC Agreed Electronic Format and Climate Action Data Trust data models—allows registries and other systems to connect incrementally and scale over time.
This type of engagement reflects a broader shift: from developing individual components to enabling coherent, end-to-end systems.
To scale this approach, PMI is developing a Carbon Registry Toolkit—a structured framework to support countries in making key design decisions, aligning registries with MRV systems and institutional arrangements, and applying common approaches to interoperability, integrity, and security. The first module—focused on these foundational decisions—will be introduced this year , as a first step toward rolling this out more systematically across countries.
The priority now is clear: to translate guidance into deployable systems that work across jurisdictions—building the infrastructure needed for credible, connected, and scalable carbon markets.
