Carbon credits are an essential way for companies and consumers to take climate action. A lot transpires during the lifecycle of a carbon credit, from the time the purchase is made – through to verification, fulfillment, and retirement. For purchases of credits with a future delivery date, which often come from frontier carbon removal projects, tracking the credits’ location in the lifecycle is especially important since these credits often do not yet exist on a registry.
Patch manages each of these steps on behalf of our customers, overseeing the order placement and purchase procedures, ensuring access to credits from vetted projects, and retiring credits on the appropriate registry or within the Patch system.
But many organizations desire a more detailed view of the credits they’ve purchased, as well as greater visibility into the lifecycle of the credit itself. This is especially true for those whose end users are the ones doing the buying: Not only must they be able to stand confidently behind the credits being offered, they must also be able to clearly communicate their impact.
A clear, post-purchase process
That’s why Patch has revamped the post-purchase process to be even more transparent. It starts with our Patch Certificates, which we've redesigned to more clearly communicate the information buyers need. This includes things like the buyer’s name, project developer, tonnage, registry, and a unique order ID—among other key details.
Delineated between avoidance and removal for ultimate clarity, these new certificates have been designed to be dynamic. That means they’re automatically updated in conjunction with the fulfillment status of the order, changing from “Certificate of Future Removal” to “Certificate of Removal” once the credits have been retired and the carbon removed from the atmosphere.
Likewise, we’ve launched a publicly hosted dynamic order page that tracks the status of an order in real time through all its stages, from purchase to placement to retirement. Customers can visit this page to quickly understand the impact of their credits and where they stand on their road to retirement. Certificates and order pages are available in the Patch platform or via the API.
Building trust
Along with revamped certificates and our more informative, transparent order page, we’re also making it easy for customers who integrate the Patch API to build trust with their end-users. That means it’s now possible to issue certificates to them directly, to share a link to the order status page, and to optionally include the user’s name on the certificate, alongside that of the enabling company.
“Greater visibility into the carbon credit process is crucial if we want to inspire greater trust in carbon markets,” explains Brennan Spellacy, Co-founder and CEO of Patch. “With these improvements, we continue to enhance transparency and push the entire industry to follow suit.”
These updates are now live: Customers who have already made carbon credit purchases can log in to the Patch platform to view their order statuses and certificates. All existing certificates have been updated to reflect the latest design and order details.
We are thrilled to offer our customers a more transparent carbon credit post-purchase experience. This launch brings us one step closer to our goal of scaling access to high-impact carbon credits.
If you want to learn more about integrating end-user certificates into your product experience, view our documentation. Certificates are available in English, French, and Japanese today, with additional language support to come.
