BeZero Publishes 14 Pre-Issuance Ratings From Microsoft's Carbon Removal Diligence Portfolio

BeZero Carbon has published 14 ex ante rating reports analysing carbon removal projects from Microsoft's own diligence process, spanning four sectors, improved forest management, soil carbon, biochar and agroforestry, across the United States, Argentina, India and Peru. The reports are described as among the most comprehensive independent pre-issuance analyses of a single buyer's carbon portfolio published to date. Full reports are available to BeZero Carbon Markets platform subscribers, a community exceeding 1,000 users, while headline ratings and project execution risk scores are accessible to the platform's roughly 10,000 freemium subscribers.

 

Why Pre-Issuance Rating Differs Fundamentally From Rating Already-Issued Credits

 

The distinction between "ex ante," or pre-issuance, ratings and the more commonly discussed practice of rating carbon credits after they've already been issued and sold is significant. Most public carbon credit rating and scrutiny happens retrospectively, assessing credits that have already entered the market and, in some documented cases, been found to overstate their claimed environmental benefit once independently examined. Pre-issuance ratings instead assess a project's carbon risk, execution risk and broader environmental and community impacts before the project has generated any credits at all, giving buyers, developers and the broader market visibility into a project's likely quality before capital has been committed and before any credits reach circulation.

That timing distinction matters considerably for market integrity: identifying and mitigating project-level risks before a project comes online is a fundamentally more useful intervention than flagging problems after credits have already been sold and used for offsetting claims, since pre-issuance diligence can influence how a project is actually structured, monitored or improved before it begins operating, rather than simply documenting deficiencies retroactively once the environmental and reputational damage from an overstated project has already occurred.

 

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Why Making This Portfolio Public Changes the Information Available to Other Market Participants

 

Microsoft's diligence reports on its own carbon removal portfolio would ordinarily remain private, used internally to inform the company's own procurement decisions as it works toward its stated ambition to become carbon negative by 2030 and remove the equivalent of its cumulative historical emissions by 2050, having contracted more than 45 million tonnes of carbon dioxide removal in fiscal year 2025 alone. Making that diligence public specifically extends its usefulness well beyond Microsoft's own procurement process: project developers gain visibility into what standard of quality the market's largest carbon removal buyer actually requires, investors gain independent risk assessment before committing capital to similar projects, advisers and marketplaces gain a reference standard to enhance their own due diligence processes, and other corporate buyers gain a benchmark against which to assess their own procurement decisions.

That kind of information-sharing addresses a structural information asymmetry that has historically characterised carbon markets, where smaller buyers or newer market entrants typically lack the resources to commission the kind of deep, sector-specific due diligence a buyer purchasing tens of millions of tonnes annually like Microsoft can afford to undertake independently. Publishing this diligence effectively socialises the benefit of Microsoft's scale-driven due diligence capability across the broader market rather than confining that analytical advantage to Microsoft's own procurement decisions alone.

 

Why the "Beyond Carbon" Assessment Signals a Maturing Quality Standard

 

Beyond the core carbon risk analysis, covering additionality, carbon accounting and permanence, and project execution risk analysis, some of the reports include what BeZero calls "beyond carbon" assessments, examining a project's broader environmental and community impacts beyond its carbon removal function specifically. Notably, the release states Microsoft's own carbon removal team collaborated directly with BeZero's Beyond Carbon experts to develop this risk and benefit assessment product, which has since become fully incorporated into BeZero's standard offering.

That collaborative product development suggests a genuine buyer-driven push to formalise environmental and social impact assessment as a standard component of carbon removal due diligence, rather than treating carbon accounting and community or environmental impact as entirely separate evaluation tracks. Extending quality assessment beyond pure carbon metrics into broader impact considerations reflects a maturing view within the carbon removal market that a project's overall quality and risk profile cannot be reduced to carbon accounting alone, since community and environmental effects can materially affect a project's long-term viability, reputational risk, and genuine net benefit even when its core carbon accounting appears sound.

 

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What This Signals About Standard-Setting in Carbon Removal Markets

 

The 14 projects span both established project developers and emerging players across genuinely different technology types, from US forestry to South American soil carbon to biochar production in Peru, giving the published portfolio a breadth that functions as a de facto reference point for what rigorous pre-issuance due diligence looks like across substantially different project categories and geographies simultaneously. That breadth is likely part of why BeZero frames this collection as a "benchmark," since few other publicly available resources currently offer comparable, independently conducted diligence spanning this range of carbon removal technology types within a single coherent methodology.

Whether other major carbon removal buyers follow Microsoft's example in making their own pre-issuance diligence public, and whether the "beyond carbon" assessment framework Microsoft helped develop becomes a more widely adopted standard component of carbon removal due diligence across the broader market, will determine how significant this disclosure proves for raising baseline due diligence standards across carbon removal procurement more broadly, beyond the immediate benefit to Microsoft's own portfolio.

 

Source: BeZero Carbon