Every figure below draws on ICVCM's own public pages plus context from earlier public BeZero Carbon research (which independently traced the CCP-approved methodology list for superpollutant categories). The question: not whether the CCP label matters (the market visibly prices it) but exactly what it certifies, and what it plainly doesn't.
No jargon. The CCP bar itself is real and credited below; the one fresh gap is worth naming plainly: here's what closing it is worth.
An agent-discovery file → the buyers and registries whose AI is checking what "CCP-Eligible" means read ICVCM's real rules, not a guessEvery agent-discovery path is a true 404 today, so an assistant asked what the Core Carbon Principles actually certify has no machine-legible surface and paraphrases scraped summaries instead of ICVCM's own principle set and CCP-Eligible program list.
ICVCM's Core Carbon Principles page names 10 principles across three buckets: Governance (Effective Governance, Tracking, Transparency, Independent Validation), Emissions Impact (Additionality, Permanence, Robust Quantification, No Double-Counting), and Sustainable Impact (Sustainable Development, Net Zero Alignment). Independent coverage of the Governing Board's own decisions states that since its first Category decisions in May 2024, the board "approved 40 carbon crediting methodologies" as meeting the Assessment Framework and "found that 25 methodologies did not", a real rejection rate, not a formality.
Source: icvcm.org/core-carbon-principles/; methodology counts cross-referenced via independent coverage of ICVCM Governing Board decisions, 2026-07-16; treat exact totals as a moving figure, re-verify against the live tracker before quoting externally
ICVCM's own announcements name Verra among the programs confirmed CCP-Eligible, joining nine others already approved: ten total by the most recent snapshot referenced in this recon. Puro.Earth's own confirmation post and Verra's confirmation post are both ICVCM's own primary sources for this list; the exact roster is worth re-checking against ICVCM's live tracker before quoting in anything external-facing, since new programs and methodology decisions land on a rolling basis.
Source: icvcm.org/integrity-council-confirms-carbon-crediting-program-puro-earth-as-ccp-eligible/, icvcm.org/integrity-council-confirms-verra-and-art-meet-its-high-integrity-benchmark/ (referenced 2026-07-16)
icvcm.org ships a real, working robots.txt (the file that tells search engines what to index, 365 bytes). But llms.txt (the file AI assistants read first), /.well-known/security.txt, ai.txt, and /.well-known/agent-card.json (the file that lets an AI assistant use a site correctly) all return an honest 404 with the identical branded template ("Page not found - ICVCM", ~229,916–229,943 bytes across all four paths), matching a nonsense-path control almost exactly: a genuine, consistent gap, not a soft-200 catch-all.
Source: icvcm.org/robots.txt, icvcm.org/llms.txt, control path (fetched 2026-07-16, byte counts and titles above)
ICVCM's CCP label rates methodologies and programs: the rules, not any single project operating under them. CarbonPlan's independent finding (6 of 14 CCP-labelled landfill-gas projects failing an additionality test, from earlier public research) is the clearest proof that a methodology-level label and a project-level or task-level fact are different questions with different answer rates. EWP's photo+GPS+signature+on-chain-settlement receipt operates at the smallest scale of all (one task, proven) and is proposed as a complementary layer that could sit underneath any CCP-approved methodology without ICVCM changing its own scope, mandate, or review process at all.
