Inside the Integrity Crisis: What Nature-Based Carbon Markets Still Need — Toby Janson-Smith

In this episode of This Week in Carbon, hosts Edward Smith and Rene Velasquez sit down with Toby Janson-Smith, CEO and Co-founder of Credegra, and former Chief Innovation and Program Development Officer at Verra, someone who has spent twenty-five years quite literally building the infrastructure that makes nature-based carbon markets possible.From co-designing the Climate Community and Biodiversity Standards at Conservation International, to architecting the VCS AFOLU framework that became the dominant standard for REDD+, Toby has been at the centre of every major turning point in this market. Now, with Credegra, he's tackling what he sees as the final bottleneck: making the certification process fast, rigorous, and transparent enough to support the scale the market needs.Key topics covered:- Why nature was effectively shut out of both the Kyoto Protocol and the early voluntary carbon market and what it took to change that- The buffer pool approach to permanence: how Verra pioneered the mechanism that made forest carbon fungible with energy and industrial credits- What actually caused the 2023 integrity crisis: not one single failure, but a perfect storm of methodology design gaps, assurance capacity limits, data limitations, and rapid growth converging at once- The baseline problem at the heart of the REDD+ scandal and the specific example of a government change that invalidated an entire project's crediting trajectory years after launch- Dynamic baselines: how reassessing the baseline at every verification cycle transforms the integrity of emission reduction credits- The jurisdictional approach to REDD+: top-down national baselines allocated by risk maps to individual projects and why this aligns with Paris Agreement accounting- Why corporate buyers pivoting away from nature entirely may be one of the biggest strategic mistakes in climate finance- The bathtub analogy: why we can't just "bail out the water" with removals, we have to turn off the spigot too- The equity case for nature-based solutions: why communities in the global south must participate in — and benefit from — carbon markets, not simply bear the costs of climate change- Credegra: how AI is being deployed to help project developers navigate hundreds of complex methodology requirements and dramatically reduce the certification bottleneck at standard-setters- The compliance market bridge: how what the VCM has built can and must be brought into regulated markets to reach meaningful scale- Why the next five years are the most critical window this market has ever had and why this is not the time for timid stepsA landmark conversation with one of the true architects of this market, and a clear-eyed view of what it still needs to become.🎧 Listen now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and more.