North American Carbon World (NACW), convened by the Climate Action Reserve hit its quarter-century mark this year - is the carbon market event on the continent that matters most. For three days in San Diego, practitioners, policymakers, financiers, and technologists gathered to assess where North American carbon markets stand and where they are headed. ISCIA was a Supporting Partner to the event, and the conference could not have arrived at a more consequential moment for the soil carbon sector, which took the stage (in several sessions) for the first time.
A Market Under Pressure — and Proving Its Resilience
The political backdrop to NACW 2026 was turbulent. The Trump administration's continued pressure on state-level climate programmes - including executive actions targeting California's emissions regime - cast a long shadow. In a striking signal of the current climate, California's Air Resources Board (ARB) withdrew from the conference at the last minute, raising questions, as Carbon Pulse reported on the opening day, about the agency's posture on stakeholder engagement at this critical juncture.
And yet the market held. Conference sessions consistently returned to the same message: North American carbon markets have demonstrated "staying power, even in the face of change and challenges." California's Cap-and-Invest programme - freshly reauthorised through 2045 - is now entering formal rulemaking, with economists at the conference making a clear-eyed case that it remains the most cost-effective mechanism available for hitting the state's 2030 emissions targets. The potential future linkage with Washington State's programme drew considerable interest, with analysts suggesting it could reduce regional emissions by 50 million tonnes while reinforcing both programmes against federal headwinds.
The State of North American Voluntary Markets session laid out the single most important trend: the accelerating separation of carbon reductions from carbon removals. This divergence - in pricing, in buyer diligence requirements, in offtake structure - is reshaping the market. Nature-based removals and high-integrity agricultural credits are commanding longer contracts, more rigorous scrutiny, and higher prices. Meanwhile, the concentration of demand is a structural tension the market must address: approximately 30 million tonnes of carbon removals transacted in 2025 came overwhelmingly from Microsoft. The company's purchases - already running at 5-6 million tonnes in Q1 2026 alone - are simultaneously signalling quality standards for the sector.
The outlook for the next twelve months, as outlined in the voluntary markets session, points to project-specific factors - co-benefits, data quality, registry pedigree, geographic location - remaining the primary drivers of value, with CCP (Core Carbon Principles) to be increasingly used as qualification criteria by sophisticated buyers, even if they are not yet moving prices on their own.
Soil Carbon's Defining Moment
Against this backdrop, soil carbon had what can fairly be called a breakout week at NACW.
Carbon Pulse – one of the conference's official media partners – published a feature on the eve of the conference noting that "four key themes helped move agricultural soil carbon from a nascent category to the high-integrity climate solution that it is today." The outlet's conference reporters followed up on April 1 with coverage confirming that market confidence in soil organic carbon (SOC) is "building as standards agencies get behind the project type, accelerating carbon removal into a new era of trust and growth."
This was not background noise. It was the central signal of the week for our sector.
The "Let's Be Certain About Soils" workshop, including ISCIA members Indigo Ag and Agricarbon, was packed with attendees – and tackled persistent misconceptions around soil carbon head-on, even taking an engaging poll of audience opinions. Experts from Rubicon Carbon and Cool Effect provided confidence in the growing market, citing variables as manageable and genuine opportunities for methodological innovation and risk management. The session drew directly on the Climate Action Reserve's Soil Enrichment Protocol and included discussion of the protocol's forthcoming major revision to version 2.0. Critically, more than one million CCP-eligible soil carbon credits are now in the market – a milestone that represents a substantive shift in credibility for the project type as a whole.
When the market's largest buyer puts confidence in, other buyers pay attention. Microsoft's landmark 12-year agreement with Indigo Ag – covering 2.85 million soil carbon credits, has made news waves in our growing industry.
ISCIA Members at the Forefront
In addition to our Secretariat, several ISCIA members were directly woven into the soil carbon conversations shaping the NACW conference. The spirit of collaboration between ISCIA members Indigo, Perennial, ChrysaLabs, and Agricarbon extended beyond the conference floor.
Indigo Ag, whose Ryan Pape sits on the board of directors of ISCIA, was among the most visible of ISCIA participants at NACW. Head of Impact & Integrity Max DuBuisson was seen across all soil carbon events, bringing the perspective of a programme that has now issued five consecutive credit crops – most recently 1.1 million independently verified credits through the Climate Action Reserve in February 2026, bringing total cumulative impact past 2 million metric tonnes of carbon removals and reductions across more than 8 million enrolled acres in 28 states. For buyers and registries alike, five consecutive issuances under rigorous protocol represents exactly the track record that builds durable market confidence.
Perennial, one of ISCIA's MMRV (measurement, monitoring, reporting and verification) company, arrived at NACW having recently achieved approval for VT0014 – the first AI-powered digital soil mapping tool approved for use in Verra's Verified Carbon Standard programme. Verra CEO Mandy Rambharos – herself speaking at NACW on the market standards panel – described VT0014 as a tool that will "meaningfully strengthen access to soil carbon markets for farmers and ranchers worldwide." On the margins of NACW, Perennial and Indigo co-hosted Soil & Spirits: A Regenerative Ag Happy Hour – an invite-only gathering for practitioners building the soil carbon ecosystem. The event brought together a cross-section of land owners, developers, buyers, and technologists for exactly the kind of informal exchange that moves markets. No slides, no panels – just the people doing the work.
ChrysaLabs similarly arrived with significant momentum: the company has become the first direct-contact proximal sensing soil technology validated by a third-party auditor for use under Verra's VM0042, delivering lab-grade soil carbon measurements in under 30 seconds in the field.
Agricarbon, the soil carbon measurement specialist backed by Barclays, is actively expanding its North American operations – bringing a depth of European field expertise and a rigorously primary-data-led methodology to one of the world's most active and rapidly evolving carbon markets. The company's Kim ten Wolde joined the "Let's Be Certain About Soils" panel alongside speakers from Indigo Ag, the Climate Action Reserve, Rubicon Carbon, and Cool Effect – and provided a clear-eyed view of where the market stands and what it still needs. Kim's takeaway from the session crystallises Agricarbon's philosophy precisely: "Measure to quantify. Model to scale." Models need high-quality foundational data. Registries need measurement that holds up under scrutiny. Buyers need confidence that what they are paying for is real.
Scope 3, Insetting, and the Data Architecture Question
One of the most substantive and forward-looking discussions at NACW concerned Scope 3 accounting – and the timing could not have been more charged. On the same morning that NACW opened in San Diego, the GHG Protocol launched a public Request for Information on its new Actions and Market Instruments (AMI) Standard, running from March 31 through May 31, 2026. The AMI is arguably the most consequential development in corporate carbon accounting in a decade, proposing to move away from a single emissions inventory toward a multi-statement reporting structure that would, for the first time, make value chain actions and market instruments fully visible alongside physical emissions.
Speakers at NACW explored the practical implications of this shift in depth. At the heart of the discussion is a fundamental tension between two accounting approaches: project-based accounting, which has a longer history and is easier to finance because it offers a clear return on a defined investment, and inventory accounting, which aims to be comprehensive but is harder to operationalise at scale, particularly in complex agricultural supply chains.
The sessions made clear that this is not an either/or question. The same underlying data – on soil, on farm management, on inputs and outputs – can feed inventory reporting, project-based credit generation, or internal sustainability ledgers. What determines the flexibility available on the back end are the data architecture decisions made upfront. Getting those decisions right, particularly around collecting what speakers described as the "responsible amount" of primary data, is increasingly the differentiating factor between programmes that are future-proof and those that are not.
A recurring theme was the risk that current Scope 3 and VCM frameworks treat insets and offsets as categorically problematic, when the real question is a simpler one: who claims the outcome? One example that resonated: food companies have in some cases been discouraging suppliers from managing methane digesters – real mitigation, happening in the supply chain – because of uncertainty about how those reductions would be attributed and reported. The market needs frameworks that reward action, not frameworks that inadvertently discourage it.
The multi-crop and supply shed attribution challenge was also examined directly. Many food and beverage companies invest in a broader supply shed but only source a single commodity from it, creating a structural problem: they can only claim credit for the fraction of the impact that maps to their direct sourcing. Proposed directions discussed include activity-based or storage-based accounting requirements, as well as first-mover reward structures that more equitably distribute the value of upstream investment.
Verra added further dimension to these discussions with its April 2 workshop "Bridging the Gap: Scope 3 Standards, Interventions, and Integrity," which walked through how the Verra Scope 3 Standard Programme – version 1.0 expected to launch in 2026 – can complement emissions inventories and address data quality and transparency challenges in supply chain climate action. For soil carbon practitioners, this is significant: a credible, registry-grade Scope 3 standard creates a new pathway for agricultural carbon outcomes that doesn't require every tonne to flow through the offset market.
The signal across all of these conversations was consistent: trust in data management is the foundation from which everything else follows. Companies that establish rigorous, auditable data systems around operational data earn the right to request sustainability data from their supply chain partners. Those that invest in inventory-building without proportional investment in mitigation risk being exposed – and being on the wrong side of the disclosure frameworks that are now arriving with clear timelines.
Closing Thought
NACW 2026 confirmed what ISCIA and its members have built toward: soil carbon is no longer a frontier prospect. It is a proven, scalable, high-integrity holistic climate solution with many co-benefits – backed by landmark offtake agreements, registry-grade measurement technology, and an evolving Scope 3 accounting architecture that will bring a new generation of corporate buyers into the market.
The questions being asked in San Diego last week – about data, about attribution, about who claims which outcomes – are precisely the questions that ISCIA members are positioned to answer. As the North American market develops through 2026 and into the next compliance cycle, we will continue to report from the front lines.
To connect with any of our members on the themes raised at NACW, reach out at [email protected]
International Soil Carbon Industry Alliance (ISCIA) is a Supporting Partner of Climate Action Reserve's North American Carbon World 2026. Our attending members included Agricarbon, ChrysaLabs, Indigo, and Perennial. ISCIA observer organisations attending NACW aside from the Reserve included Verra and Gold Standard.