Every year, companies spend billions of dollars on voluntary carbon markets, paying to reduce or avoid emissions elsewhere in the world as a way of offsetting their own. One common practice is planting trees. If you plant enough trees to cancel out the emissions you've released, the net effect is zero. Or so the theory goes. That theory came under serious strain in 2023, when investigations into Verra, the world's largest carbon registry, exposed how many carbon projects failed to hold up in practice.

Daniel Morrell has a longer history with this industry than most. In 1988, he traded the world's first tonne of carbon. In 1992, he founded Future Forests, and it was Morrell who coined the term “Carbon Neutral,” now recognised in the Oxford English Dictionary. According to Balance Eco's own account of his career, he grew disillusioned as the voluntary carbon market he had helped build was pulled toward low-integrity practices, and eventually walked away from the business he founded. Balance Units, developed through his new venture Balance Eco, are his response, layering additional requirements onto existing certified carbon credits.

This sits within a wider reckoning across the industry. Since 2023, the voluntary carbon market has struggled to fully restore the trust it lost. Separately, there has also been a broader recognition that carbon alone is too narrow a measure of genuine nature protection, prompting a wave of new approaches, biodiversity credits, nature-based finance frameworks, and now Balance Units, all attempting to work out what a credible, whole-rounded approach to nature protection actually looks like. That unresolved question is itself creating real opportunity for the people willing to help answer it.

Why Carbon Markets Lost Public Trust

Carbon markets have always faced a genuine ethical debate. Critics argue that paying to offset emissions elsewhere lets companies continue damaging the climate without changing their own behaviour. Defenders counter that the atmosphere does not care where CO2 comes from, only how much there is, so a genuine reduction anywhere should count equally, wherever it happens.

That debate might have stayed a matter of principle if the reductions themselves had reliably materialised. Research increasingly suggests they often did not. One 2024 systematic review estimated that fewer than 16% of the credits examined represented real carbon emissions reductions.

This gap between what credits claimed and what they actually delivered is known as over-crediting. It meant companies were publicly claiming emissions reductions, and in many cases carbon neutrality, based on climate benefits that had never actually happened.

How Balance Units Work

Balance Units work differently. Rather than simply paying for carbon emissions reductions, the buyer is paying for ecosystem, biodiversity, and community benefits. Such projects likely come with carbon storage, but that is not the primary aim.

None of these individual elements are new to the industry. Rating agencies such as Sylvera already assess biodiversity and community impact as part of standard carbon credit ratings, scoring projects on species richness, biodiversity pressure, and community outcomes. The difference lies in how binding these requirements are. For a standard carbon credit, strong co-benefits can earn a project a price premium, but a project can still be highly rated on carbon grounds alone even with weak biodiversity or community outcomes. Carbon Market Watch has specifically flagged this as a structural weakness, noting that all major rating agencies treat co-benefits as a separate assessment rather than folding it into a project's overall quality score. The Balance Unit does not allow that trade-off. Its principal commitments are structural requirements, not optional extras a project can choose to pursue:

• Land protected for approximately 100 years
• Native and mixed-species planting
• Replanting following fire or another disaster
• Biodiversity and socioeconomic reporting
• At least 40% of development finance directed to the local community where one exists
• No permission for buyers to claim carbon neutrality or conventional offsetting

The Case for Prioritising Biodiversity and Communities

Balance Units are built around ongoing local investment, communities earning continuing income from projects such as agroforestry, beekeeping, ecotourism, and paid work preventing fires and illegal logging. The idea is that this kind of standing economic interest gives communities a reason to keep protecting the land over the long term.

This does not eliminate risk. Balance Units will not be immune to underperforming or failing projects either, and the real test of the model will be how it responds when that happens. What is different is that biodiversity and community outcomes are mandatory conditions of the credit rather than an optional layer scored afterwards.

Why Balance Units Still Face Carbon Credit Credibility Questions

Balance Units represent a different set of priorities to traditional carbon credits, not a settled answer. A compelling idea still needs proof.

Balance is a methodology added to an existing certified carbon credit. It's not a new standard. It therefore inherits all the strengths and weaknesses of the original project's calculations. Adding biodiversity and community benefits creates further claims that must be measured.

This is particularly difficult for biodiversity. A tonne of CO2 is always the same, quantifiable and comparable. The biodiversity of a new woodland cannot be compared in the same way with a wetland, grassland, or existing forest. Proving additionality requires a credible sense of what would have happened without the project, and researchers have warned that limited biodiversity data leaves many sites without a reliable baseline to compare against, making that counterfactual difficult to establish.

The 100-year commitment is worth scrutinising for a specific reason. A promise to protect land legally for a century is not the same as a guarantee that the carbon and habitat on that land will remain intact for a century. A protected forest can still burn. When it does, the carbon and mature habitat are lost immediately, even though the legal protection commitment continues unbroken. The real question is whether the model has genuine provisions for recovering from that kind of loss when it happens, not simply a long-term promise on paper.

Carbon Market Reform Needs More Than Sustainability Specialists

Whether Balance Units, biodiversity credits, or whatever comes after them end up being the answer, the industry's attempt to build a more whole-rounded approach to nature protection needs talented professionals across the board. Ecologists must determine the viability of new habitats. Data specialists must create credible monitoring systems capable of measuring biodiversity and community outcomes with the same rigour long applied to carbon. Lawyers need to draft century-long commitments, ensuring they remain enforceable.

At every level, from auditors and project managers to insurers and scientists, professionals are needed to protect companies from false claims and ensure that every penny spent on these projects is put to the best use.

For career changers, much of this expertise already exists outside the environmental sector. Experience in finance, law, insurance, software, regulation, or project delivery could transfer into this developing market.

Carbon markets took decades to build the infrastructure they have now, imperfect as it still is. Nature finance, bringing carbon and biodiversity together properly, is only just finding its feet, and the opportunities in shaping it are still wide open.