Data Standardization is Here: How CDOP Benefits Carbon Market Participants
Every hour spent reformatting or streamlining carbon project data is an hour not spent financing climate solutions. But, across the carbon market ecosystem, organizations are wasting time on this exact problem: translating between dozens of disconnected data formats.
This is a structural bottleneck that's limiting the carbon market's potential to drive meaningful climate action.
When ratings agencies face data discrepancies extracting information from PDFs; when buyers struggle to compare projects across different registries; and when project developers are asked to submit the same information in dozens of different formats, the market continues to fragment.
The Carbon Data Open Protocol (CDOP) addresses this issue. By establishing an open standard for carbon market data, CDOP eliminates the technical overhead that every market participant faces. This streamlines the focus back on the work that actually matters: scaling climate finance and impact.
Carbon data: A different challenge for every player
The data standardization challenge manifests differently across the carbon market value chain, but the underlying inefficiency touches every participant:
Buyers & investors
The problem: Buyers and investors currently face a maze of inconsistent data formats when trying to evaluate and compare carbon credits. Without standardization, due diligence requires manual data aggregation across multiple sources, slowing decision-making and increasing transaction costs.
How CDOP helps: CDOP streamlines project discovery, improves due diligence processes, and simplifies reporting to stakeholders - turning what was once a multi-week data gathering exercise into automated analysis.
Project developers
The problem: Developers currently submit project information through dozens of different templates and formats, often re-entering identical data for various stakeholders. This administrative burden drains resources that could be directed toward project development and community engagement.
How CDOP helps: Using CDOP, developers benefit from reduced administrative overhead, increased project visibility across platforms, and simplified reporting that reaches multiple stakeholders simultaneously.
Ratings agencies
The problem: Ratings agencies face an acute challenge, spending significant resources manually extracting project data in inconsistent formats before any analysis can begin.
How CDOP helps: CDOP transforms this through automated data ingestion, enabling faster ratings turnaround and scalable analytics that allow analysts to focus on interpretation and risk assessment rather than data wrangling.
Registries
The problem: Registries struggle with integration requests from marketplaces, rating agencies, and institutional investors, each requiring custom data formatting.
How CDOP helps: CDOP enables automated data distribution, eliminates technical overhead from custom integrations, and simplifies reporting to regulatory and oversight bodies through consistent, exportable formats.
Data providers
The problem: Data providers currently invest heavily in normalizing diverse data formats before any value-added analysis can occur.
How CDOP helps: CDOP streamlines data aggregation, improves data consistency and timeliness through structured inputs, and scalable analytics without the constant need for reformatting or back-end restructuring.
RFP Owners
The problem: RFP owners managing carbon credit procurement face the challenge of comparing project proposals submitted in varying formats with inconsistent data.
How CDOP helps: CDOP enhances comparability across bids, reduces overhead from data standardization, and scales streamlined procurement processes.
Insurers
The problem: Insurers evaluating carbon project risks require consistent, comparable data to assess exposure accurately.
How CDOP helps: CDOP sets the foundation for improved risk evaluation through standardized project-level information, more efficient assessment processes, and reduced technical overhead from data cleaning operations.
National governments
The problem: Governments increasingly need to integrate carbon market activity into broader climate policy frameworks, but inconsistent data formats create barriers to analysis and reporting.
How CDOP helps: CDOP enables seamless policy integration, supports Article 6 compliance procedures, and simplifies climate reporting for national inventories and international disclosure frameworks.
Industry bodies
The problem: Organizations like the ICVCM face challenges in monitoring market integrity and standards’ compliance across diverse data formats.
How CDOP helps: CDOP facilitates benchmarking and oversight through consistent data structures, promotes adoption of integrity standards by embedding requirements into market infrastructure, and enhances accountability across the ecosystem.
Lawyers
The problem: Legal teams supporting carbon market transactions require rapid access to reliable project information for due diligence and risk assessment.
How CDOP helps: CDOP improves due diligence efficiency through machine-readable data, simplifies reporting processes, and reduces overhead from document review and verification.
What’s clear is that every organization in the carbon market currently dedicates significant resources to cleaning, formatting, and standardizing project data. CDOP substantially reduces—or even eliminates—this task, allowing organizations to redirect time and expertise toward their core mission.
By relieving analysts from tedious data extraction, developers from endless forms, and governments from formatting bottlenecks, the system clears space for what truly matters: a stronger, more robust, and higher integrity carbon market. The result isn’t just efficiency — it’s a market that grows, matures, and delivers greater climate impact.
Network effects: When standards create market transformation
The true value of CDOP emerges through its network effects. As more organizations adopt the schema, the benefits compound across the entire ecosystem.
So, if a project developer submits data to a registry in one format, which rating agencies then manually extract and reformat, which buyers then struggle to compare across platforms, and which government analysts then re-process for policy analysis - each step requires custom data transformation, causing friction and delay.
With widespread CDOP adoption, the same project data flows seamlessly through the entire value chain. Project developers submit once in CDOP format, registries distribute it automatically to integrated platforms, rating agencies ingest data directly for immediate analysis, buyers compare standardized information across sources, and government systems aggregate market activity without manual intervention.
This interoperability creates market liquidity in ways that go beyond simple efficiency gains. When buyers can easily compare projects across registries, market competition increases. When rating agencies can process projects faster, market transparency and integrity improves. When government systems can aggregate market activity efficiently, regulatory clarity and market confidence grows.
The network effects also unlock innovation that is currently out of reach. With standardized data flowing through the ecosystem, new analytical tools, risk assessment models, and marketplace features can be built on a stable foundation rather than custom, disparate data integrations.
How to get started with CDOP 1.0
CDOP’s Version 1.0 schema - covering location, project details and approach, and disclosures and issuances - establishes the foundation for this transformation.
For carbon markets to mature and reach their potential in driving climate finance, CDOP encourages every participant across the value chain to embrace this standardization. While efficiency gains, reduced costs, and improved transparency benefit individual organizations, the real transformation stems from the network effects that strengthen the entire climate effort.
CDOP V.10 WILL LAUNCH AT CLIMATE WEEK NYC
Following CDOP Version 1.0’s official launch at Climate Week New York in September 2025, CDOP Version 1.0 will be freely available for all market participants to access via GitHub.
