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September 18, 2025.4 minutes
Maturing the VCM: The impact of AgreenaCarbon’s Verra verification
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By now you’ll have heard the news: the AgreenaCarbon Project has become Europe’s first large-scale soil carbon project to be verified by Verra. This is a huge deal for Agreena, and also for the industry more widely. So let’s zoom out: let’s look at the VCM.
The Voluntary Carbon Market has been slowly growing in prominence over the last couple of decades, designed to enable companies and individuals to compensate for hard-to-abate, often Scope 3, emissions. However, its progress has been hampered by a lack of standards and regulations. Historically, this absence facilitated controversial carbon projects that didn’t hold up to scrutiny, for example vaguely equating one tree planted with a particular measure of carbon removed. Rightfully, these projects were challenged, and subsequently dismantled. Since then, regulations and standards have begun to emerge and guide the VCM in a more transparent direction. No projects of AgreenaCarbon’s scale have achieved Verra verification, the most rigorous of them all, until now.
For the first half of 2025, the VCM was regarded as an important, but still emerging, market. Today, I’m calling it - the VCM has emerged. The AgreenaCarbon Project’s verification gives the soil carbon category the legitimacy it needs to move forward, and, with its size, supports the VCM toward delivering climate impact at the scale needed.
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With the impact of each of these credits now verified, the market must move towards a ‘cost per impact’, where price points reflect real value. We at Agreena are the first in the world to prove we are capable of delivering this impact at scale, and now companies like Radisson Hotel Group and Ryanair, that recognise the value of investing in regenerative agriculture - in farmers, in soil and in future-proofing the foundation of our food system - are welcoming the opportunity to play their part.
Officially, AgreenaCarbon credits represent 1 tonne of carbon reduced or removed from the atmosphere. But when we drill a little deeper, each credit represents more than that. The raw results of carbon removals and GHG emission reductions calculations do not form credits automatically. Our team factors in the risk of overestimation - namely, leakage, uncertainty and buffer. And beyond the measurement of the carbon itself, each credit comes from a real field, on a real farm, cared for by a real farmer. Each farmer in our project is transitioning to regenerative agriculture - changing the way that they’ve done their job for their whole life. It’s a big thing. Even though we don’t like to talk about climate and money together, this is where we have to - it’s about resilience. Future proofing the climate, the farms, the supply chains, the farmers and the families - and the cost of transition to resilience is not small. We have to talk about money. Money is a dirty word to many, but to me, it is a topic I value highly (maybe we can blame my previous career in banking!). Transitioning to regenerative agriculture, in turn storing carbon in soil and generating carbon credits, is not free - it comes with risks and costs each farmer money.
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As a society, we can no longer afford to treat the soil beneath our feet like dirt. We must support farmers transitioning to regenerative agriculture not only morally, but financially. I’ll be blunt: if you want to get more for your one tonne soil carbon credit - higher integrity, higher standards, and more money rightly funnelled back to the farmers - the more you should pay.
The verification of the AgreenaCarbon Project gives climate-conscious companies the opportunity to put their money where their mouth is, and support not only soil carbon, but farmers - real people, in their local regions. For both the VCM and the climate, the potential here is unlimited. Let’s make an impact.
Frederik Aagaard is the Chief Commercial Officer (CCO) at Agreena, where he is responsible for accelerating Agreena’s overall business growth by leading its commercial division, which includes areas such as business solutions, farmer platforms, carbon markets, marketing, and strategic partnerships.
Frederik is a strategic leader with more than 10 years of extensive experience in commercial growth and expansion from various senior leadership roles at Danske Bank. Frederik holds a Master's degree in Business Administration and Finance from Aarhus University, complemented by an Executive MBA, as well as specialised training in Business Model Innovation for Organizational Transformation at MIT Sloan School of Management.
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