Integrity decides whether a credit can carry your claim. This assessment measures what the project delivers beyond the carbon — how broadly, and on how strong a footing. It runs on a published ladder, in six domains, to a total of 360.
Every portfolio, measured
All seventeen Sustainable Development Goals are assessed. Each sits in exactly one domain, and each domain is worth up to sixty points. A project’s total across the six is its 360° Impact score.
Two goals are scored narrowly, and the assessment says so. Climate action is scored on adaptation and resilience only. Partnership is scored on local institutional partnership only.
Where a domain has no goals applicable to the project type, it scores zero into that project’s total. A forestry project earns nothing in the energy domain, because planting trees does not deliver electricity. That is a real characteristic of the project rather than a penalty, and it is why some technologies cannot reach the upper bands.
The ladder runs from no substantiated contribution, through outcomes inherent in the technology or identified by the project, to contributions that are monitored and finally quantified.
| Points | Step | What it takes |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | Not claimed | No contribution, or a contribution claimed with nothing behind it. |
| 20 | Inherent or identified | A direct physical consequence of the technology, evidenced for the activity class in published literature — or identified in the project’s own documentation. |
| 40 | Described | The contribution is described, with a defined method for monitoring it. |
| 60 | Quantified | The outcome is quantified, its measurement basis is stated, and it has been monitored across the crediting period. |
Improved health, household income and restored habitat are not reduced to a common measure of social value. The method assesses how broadly a project contributes across the goals and how strongly each contribution is evidenced — nothing more, and it does not pretend otherwise.
This follows directly from the ladder, and it is deliberate. It does not mean the measured outcome is worth more. It means there is a stronger basis for counting it in an assessed portfolio, and that a project which has done the measuring should not rank below one that has not.
A fifth step, independently verified impact, is scheduled for 1 January 2031, with a published review during 2029. From that date, impact that has not been independently verified will no longer reach the upper bands. It forms no part of the four-step ladder in force today.
These two produce the same number and mean opposite things. They are recorded separately, shown separately and never allowed to look alike.
Life below water is not a meaningful question for a cookstove programme. The goal is excluded from the domain, and the reason is recorded. It does not count against the project, and it does not sit in the denominator when the domain is averaged.
The goal is in scope for this activity type and the project has not substantiated a contribution to it. It scores zero, it stays in the denominator, and it lowers the domain. That is the assessment working as intended.
A domain is the average of the goals that apply to it, so how many apply changes what a number means. A project scoring sixty in a domain where only one goal applies has had a single finding move it sixty points. A project scoring forty-seven across three goals has been assessed three times over.
The second is the more reliable number, and often the better project, despite the lower total. So the number of applicable goals is disclosed alongside every domain score, on the wheel and in your evidence pack.
A higher score does not automatically mean a better carbon project. Carbon integrity is settled before the impact assessment begins, and it is settled by the screen rather than by this scale.
A mark that every project receives measures nothing. Excluding these two is what stops the scale rewarding a project for the qualities that got it through the screen in the first place.
Every carbon-carrying credit already represents independently verified mitigation, so scoring it again would give every such project the same mark. Climate action is scored on adaptation instead: drought resilience, flood buffering, whether a community is better placed to absorb a shock.
Every carbon project involves partnership of some kind, so the fact of it distinguishes nothing. We score whether a local institution has been built that survives the foreign developer leaving.
A project cannot reach a score on the strength of its carbon saving and its delivery partners alone — things every screened project already has.
It is not a diagram of the assessment. Each sector’s radius is that domain’s score, so the shape on screen and the number in the contract are the same object.
Illustrative project · select a sector
Each sector is one domain
Six sectors, in a fixed order set by the method. The order never changes between projects, so two wheels can be compared by shape.
The radius is the domain score
Not a category, not a rating. The distance from the centre is the number.
The faded track is the available sixty
It sits behind every sector at full radius, so the wheel keeps a constant footprint and an empty domain is visibly empty rather than absent.
The centre carries the total and its band
The sum of the six domain scores, out of 360, with the band in force at the date of assessment.
Selecting a sector discloses the goals
The domain score, how many goals applied out of how many sit in that domain, and the step each one reached. Goals that cannot apply are shown desaturated rather than hidden.
The wheel above is an illustrative project assessment, not a delivered portfolio. It is the same project as the first row of the worked example below: six domain scores of 40, 30, 30, 40, 40 and 30, totalling 210.
Domain scores aggregate the same way the total does. Each portfolio domain score is the tonne-weighted average of the project domain scores, and because a project’s total is the sum of its six domains and the weighting is linear, the six portfolio domain averages sum to the portfolio score.
That is also what makes the wheel useful year on year. It shows where your portfolio is thin, in a form you can act on at the next engagement.
Not a band on every credit. Bands apply to a project’s score and to a portfolio’s weighted average on the same scale, so the two are read against one table.
The band names are settled and the method is not changing. The numeric boundaries are working values, revised as the assessed universe grows. Your portfolio is assessed against the boundaries in force at its date of assessment, so a later revision does not change what you were delivered or what you may claim.
Each project carries its own score. The portfolio score is the average of those scores weighted by the claimed tonnes each assessment is allocated — not a simple average across projects, which would let a hundred tonnes of one thing be cancelled out by one tonne of another.
The denominator is the claim-category portfolio, not the engagement. Where an engagement carries one claim category the two are the same number. Where it carries more than one they are not, and using the engagement total would report a band no single claim actually rests on.
| Project | 360° Impact score | Claimed tonnes | Contribution |
|---|---|---|---|
| Improved cookstoves | 210 · Strong | 300 | 63,000 |
| Wind repowering | 55 · Limited | 700 | 38,500 |
| Portfolio | 101.5 · Moderate | 1,000 | 101,500 |
A per-credit band forces every tonne to the same level, which means paying the highest-impact price across the whole volume and often buying a single technology in a single geography. Composing to an average holds your band while diversifying across project types, vintages and countries, and while sourcing the carbon-led portion at the keenest price the market offers. The band you contracted is delivered. What it costs, and how diversified the risk is, both improve.
Composing to an average is what makes the band affordable, and it is legitimate precisely because every tonne in that portfolio supports the same claim.
An average is not one portfolio. It is many, and you should be able to see which one you have.
Tonnes supporting different claims are never pooled
They are not interchangeable, so a figure spanning them describes nothing anyone can say. A secondary aggregate is labelled as such and never presented unqualified beside a specific claim.
Every project’s own score is disclosed
Not only the portfolio figure. A single number hides how it was reached.
So is the distribution across the four bands
What proportion of your claimed tonnes came from Exceptional, Strong, Moderate and Limited projects. A portfolio at Moderate composed of two adjacent bands and one composed of extremes are different portfolios.
There is no ceiling on the Limited proportion
A cap would cost the sourcing flexibility this design exists to create. We disclose the composition instead. A client who wants a tighter spread can specify one, and we will price it.
Engineered removal scores Moderate in practice, and we do not expect that to change. Two of its six domains are empty: it delivers nothing in education or gender equality, and nothing in health.
Someone buying durable removal is buying thousand-year storage rather than community outcomes. Limited or Moderate describes a narrow band of assessed wider impact. It says nothing about the tonne, which has already cleared ten gates, twenty criteria and returned meets on all six Tier 1 criteria, including safeguards.
A durable removal can be curated alongside other eligible projects so the claim-category portfolio reaches the band you contracted at the lowest available cost. That is the whole reason the band sits at portfolio level rather than on each credit.
A project scoring Limited may well be delivering more than it has measured. The assessment records only what the defined scoring standard supports, and says so rather than filling the gap with an estimate.
One category works differently. A net-zero residual counterbalancing portfolio is removal-only, so its band is calculated solely from the removal tonnes used for that claim. Reduction credits retired alongside it are a separate climate contribution, reported separately, and are never allocated to that band.
A low score is something we disclose and design around. It is not a reason to avoid the technology, and not something to dress up as better than it is.
Tell us the band you want the finished portfolio to reach. We will compose it from qualifying projects at the lowest available cost and show you every score behind the average.