The material that explains this market is being written now

In March 2025 SBTi published a synthesis of the evidence submitted on certificates. Across fuel, electricity and commodity certificates it reviewed 418 pieces (p.7), of which 150 were assessed for the fuels sector (p.9).

Of those 150, one was classified in the top tier (p.8).

That number is easy to misread

Reading it as "certificates are flimsy" would be wrong.

Legislation and peer-reviewed papers were submitted too. They were graded down because they did not address four or more of the eight research questions SBTi had set. That is not an assessment of any document's quality; it is an assessment of how much of the question set one document covers.

The eight questions are things like: does a certificate actually deliver reductions? What regulatory safeguards and market infrastructure would be needed for it to be effective? What claims can and cannot be made? Does the market value of a certificate correspond to the cost of abatement?

One paper rarely covers four or more of those together. That is why the tier fell — not because the individual documents were wrong.

So what kind of moment is this

The rules are already standing. The standard sets out the conditions under which a certificate may be used. What is missing is the material showing how those rules work in practice.

Put differently: whoever has operating data now and actually runs it is standing where that material gets made. The documents that will explain this market later come out of the records being kept today.

This article expands one section of LCS EAC special report 1, Do the Reductions You Buy Become Yours? The full report works from the SBTi Corporate Net-Zero Standard V2.0 and SBTi Evidence Synthesis Report Part 2 as primary sources, with the printed page number given for every quotation.