Climate Warehouse

Building an End-to-End Digital Ecosystem for Carbon Markets

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The Climate Warehouse program prototypes, tests, and develops digital infrastructure to foster greater transparency, trust, and integrity in the carbon markets. Successfully prototyped and tested elements of the digital infrastructure will be operationalized to build the market infrastructure. Examples include the metadata platform designed to connect and aggregate registry information—now operationalized outside the World Bank as the Climate Action Data Trust (CAD Trust)—as well as digital MRV systems, national carbon registries, tokenization instruments, and a one-stop resource platform to strengthen knowledge-sharing and capacity-building.

The World Bank’s Climate Warehouse program develops tools, technologies, and market infrastructure to promote transparency, comparability, and trust in carbon markets. A core focus of the program has been the design and testing of a “public metadata layer” to connect disparate carbon credit registries, supported by common data standards, APIs, and multi-country pilots. This work aims to reduce risks such as double counting and to enable smoother interoperability across systems.

The Climate Action Data Trust (CAD Trust) is the operational outcome of this effort. Established jointly by the World Bank, the Government of Singapore, and IETA, CAD Trust is a decentralized, open-source platform that implements the Climate Warehouse architecture. It provides a neutral, global infrastructure where participating registries can publish standardized information on carbon credits. By doing so, CAD Trust enhances transparency, facilitates cross-registry tracking, and supports the integrity of international carbon markets, including those operating under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement and the voluntary carbon market. The World Bank serves on CAD Trust’s Advisory Board to provide technical support and guidance as needed.

Our Support on Carbon Asset Registry Infrastructure

Carbon market registries are foundational to the integrity and credibility of carbon markets. They serve as the systems for issuing, tracking, and retiring carbon credits, ensuring that each unit is counted only once and that transactions are transparent and verifiable.

Our support to countries is organized around two complementary areas of work: global guidance and knowledge products, and direct national-level technical assistance.

 

1. Global Guidance and Knowledge Products 

We work with a broad coalition of partners in the carbon market ecosystem to develop technical and actionable knowledge products that provide guidance on key design elements of carbon market registry infrastructure. This work is carried out through the Carbon Markets Infrastructure Working Group (CMI WG), a collaboration of more than 40 organizations, and has produced a suite of technical outputs to guide market actors, policymakers, and infrastructure providers.  

Key publications include:

A Roadmap for Safe, Efficient, and Interoperable Carbon Markets Infrastructure (World Bank and CMI Working Group, 2024) provides the overarching strategic framework for strengthening carbon market infrastructure. It sets out a common vision and identifies priority areas for building carbon market infrastructure that is safe, efficient, and interoperable.

Technical Guidance Notes 
The following five technical guidance notes translate the CMI Working Group's recommendations into actionable tools and frameworks for market practitioners, infrastructure providers, and policymakers: 

Technical Guidance Note on Ecosystem Governance assesses the current governance landscape across the carbon market infrastructure ecosystem, identifies gaps and fragmentation risks, and provides recommendations for establishing clear roles, responsibilities, and accountability frameworks among market actors from standard-setters and registries to trading platforms and verification bodies.

Transaction Integrity for Carbon Markets Infrastructure: Tools and Recommendations addresses the risks that can undermine the integrity of carbon market transactions — including fraud, double counting, and money laundering — and presents practical tools and recommendations to strengthen transaction security, auditability, and accountability across the full credit lifecycle.

Information Security for Carbon Markets Infrastructure: Tools and Recommendations outlines the key risks to data security within carbon market systems and provides minimum standards and actionable recommendations to help market infrastructure providers safeguard sensitive information and maintain system resilience. 

Enhancing Data and Systems Interoperability for Carbon Markets: Current Landscape and Strategic Recommendations maps the current state of data systems across voluntary and compliance carbon markets, identifies the barriers to seamless data exchange, and sets out strategic recommendations for achieving interoperability between registries, trading platforms, and national accounting systems — enabling a market that is locally grounded but globally connected.

Standardizing Digital MRV in Carbon Markets: System Evaluation Criteria and Hotspots Assessment provides an evaluation criteria for digital MRV systems, identifies priority sectors and use cases where digitalization can deliver the greatest gains, and provides a hotspots assessment to guide investment and adoption decisions.

 

2. Country Support

We help countries apply the global knowledge and guidance provided through these resources to their own registry development and implementation. This support takes two main forms: structured capacity building through our registry training program, and targeted technical assistance tailored to each country's specific context.

Registry Training Program
This training delivers a curriculum across four modules, designed to equip government officials with the technical and functional knowledge required to establish and operate a carbon registry aligned with Article 6 requirements. It covers both the operational and governance dimensions of registry management, preparing officials to make informed decisions about system design, data standards, and institutional arrangements. Training has been delivered to officials in Bhutan, Tanzania, Thailand, India, Nepal, Belize, Brazil, and Chile, with several other client countries in the pipeline.

Targeted Technical Assistance
We also provide targeted technical assistance to help client countries assess their readiness for carbon registry development, including data interoperability, regulatory and institutional frameworks, and governance arrangements needed to establish and operate a national registry.  This support applies the global knowledge and guidance to country-specific circumstances, helping governments identify requirements, assess options, and inform decisions on the design and development of their national registry systems.
 

A digital MRV (dMRV) can be defined as a MRV system that includes using digital technologies and processes to automate the collection of data, the reporting of GHG emissions, and the generation of mitigation outcomes to improve the functioning of future carbon markets and ease the burden of satisfying reporting requirements under the Paris Agreement.  

 

The World Bank aims to support countries to pilot digital MRV systems to demonstrate proof-of-concept, test interlinks of digital MRV systems with registries, and foster an enabling environment for the implementation of digital MRV. A Digital MRV improves the speed and accuracy of reporting, lowers reporting and verification costs, and increases scalability and security of MRV systems. 

 

Principles:

  • A dMRV has a two-layer system (physical and digital) that automatically collects, stores, analyses and display relevant data in the context of emission mitigation projects. It allows users to obtain, in a faster and cheaper way, reliable data aiming at creating emission reduction credits.  
  • dMRV can help mitigation projects report data from remote locations with minimal human intervention.  
  • AI and algorithms provide data control and quality checks and identify missing or wrong data for an enhanced accuracy when reporting.  
  • Data storage ensures access to historic of projects, raw data, transformed data and easy and quick access to verification body at any stage of the value chain. 

 

Publications: