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CERT Foundation
Making credible claims

Say what you did. Show your working.

CERT publishes claims guidance aligned with the VCMI Claims Code. Every claim links to public retirement certificates and the underlying registry attributes.

Principles

  • Reduce first. Compensate the rest.
  • Match retirements to a specific inventory boundary (Scope 1, 2, 3 — or specific value-chain emissions).
  • Link every claim to public evidence: retirement certificate ID(s), quantity, vintage, methodology, and registry attributes.
  • Do not double-claim across inventory boundaries or between parties.

What CERT will not endorse

Prohibited framings
"Carbon neutral" claims without a matching audited inventory or retirement certificates. Vague "low-carbon" claims tied only to a small share of retirements.

Public examples

As buyers retire CRUs, CERT will publish structured examples of well-formed claims for reference — including the retirement certificate JSON, matching inventory statements and any host-party authorisation.