Market
VCM
Also known as: Voluntary Carbon Market
TL;DR
The market in which buyers — usually corporates with voluntary net-zero pledges — purchase carbon credits without a regulatory obligation to do so.
Full explainer
The Voluntary Carbon Market (VCM) is the set of trading venues, intermediaries, registries, and standards through which carbon credits flow when the buyer is acting voluntarily — typically a corporate offsetting its operational emissions to meet a net-zero target, rather than a regulated emitter fulfilling a legal cap.
The VCM and the Compliance Carbon Market (CCM) draw from overlapping methodologies but with very different governance: VCM is governed by private standards-setters (Verra/VCS, Gold Standard, ACR, CAR, plus the integrity bodies ICVCM and VCMI) rather than by a regulator. Indonesian Verra/Gold-Standard projects are VCM credits. The same project may also list its credits in SRN-PPI and trade them on IDXCarbon (which today is hybrid — primarily VCM-style but operating under OJK regulation).
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