Verification is not an audit of a certificate already issued

"Third-party verified" looks like one phrase, but where it sits turns it into two different things.

Behind issuance, it is an audit

The certificate has already been issued and traded, and verification checks afterwards whether it was right. If something turns out to be wrong, certificates already in the market have to be pulled back — and unwinding a certificate that has passed through several hands along a chain is close to impossible in practice.

Ahead of issuance, it is a condition

Data that does not pass verification never becomes a certificate. Nothing has to be pulled back.

Which one is it, actually

On 2 June 2026 the insetting platform 123Carbon announced it had appointed SCS Global Services as its independent assurance provider, and wrote the role like this — SCS performs third-party verification of reduction data before environmental attribute certificates are issued.

The same announcement spelled it out again: SCS independently verifies the underlying data supporting certificate issuance on the 123Carbon platform, and confirms alignment with international accounting standards.

The order is: verification first.

What changes for a cargo owner

What the verifier looks at is not the certificate but the data. And they look at it before the certificate exists.

So preparation does not start with an issuance application. It starts with operating records in a form a verifier can open.

※ This article cites published material. The companies and bodies named have no contractual relationship with us.

This article expands one section of LCS EAC special report 3, Who Vouches for It. The full report works from published material by 123Carbon and DP World and from SBTi's Corporate Net-Zero Standard V2.0 as primary sources, and does not fill in values that were never published.