By Elena Vasquez

Columbia University put a single question to a New York Climate Week room: what would it take to pull voluntary carbon credit demand off the floor? The university's session, summarized under the title "Boosting Carbon Credit Demand by Advancing Regulation and Market Infrastructure," gathered practitioners across compliance, finance, and project development to map the regulatory and operational fixes they see as the binding constraints on the market.

The framing reflects a market that has spent several years absorbing a structural reset. Voluntary carbon prices for several major project categories have settled below the level needed to underwrite new issuance at scale, and corporate procurement teams have grown more selective about which credits they retire. Columbia's published summary identifies two reinforcing levers: regulation that gives buyers a defensible asset, and trading, settlement, and registry infrastructure that institutional capital requires to enter at scale.

What does the conversation change for buyers?

For corporate offtakers, the practical question is whether new rules translate into procurement-ready instruments. The session's focus on integrity frameworks — the work being advanced by bodies such as the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market and various national disclosure regimes — points to a market that may increasingly bifurcate between credits that meet a documented integrity bar and those that do not. Buyers running net-zero programs need to know which side of that line their portfolios will sit on, and on what timeline.

For project developers, the lever is bankability. The roundtable's second pillar — market infrastructure — covers the plumbing that turns a serialized registry unit into an investable instrument: standardized contracts, transparent secondary trading, functioning derivatives markets, and rating agency frameworks. Without those, demand cannot clear at the volumes needed to justify expanding supply. The dynamic that has kept avoided-deforestation credits trading at a small fraction of what it costs to fund a long-horizon project is exactly what the session targeted.

What infrastructure gaps did the discussion flag?

The Columbia summary points to two categories of missing plumbing. The first is regulatory: a patchwork of voluntary disclosure regimes, state and federal procurement standards, and emerging compliance schemes — including the EU's Carbon Removal Certification Framework and California's various climate programs — is creating parallel definitions of what counts as a high-quality credit. The second is operational: trading venues, settlement systems, and audit standards that institutional buyers require before they allocate capital at the scale needed to move prices.

Where does the market go from here?

The regulatory milestones that will decide what happens next sit outside the roundtable itself. Practitioners watching the next 12 months will track: the SEC's climate disclosure rule and how it treats carbon credit use, the EU's CRCF implementing acts, the maturation of the IC-VCM's Core Carbon Principles assessment pipeline, and any federal procurement guidance that standardizes what counts as a valid retirement. Each is a discrete decision point that can shift buyer behavior.

The Columbia session's contribution is to put those decision points on a single agenda. Whether the agenda produces action is a question for the regulators and exchanges, not the academics.