Singapore’s National Environment Agency added a third Verra forest carbon methodology to the eligibility list for its International Carbon Credit Framework on October 13, 2026, giving a compliance carbon tax a direct line into voluntary improved forest management credits for the first time. The addition, VM0010, Verra’s Methodology for Improved Forest Management: Conversion from Logged to Protected Forest, joins the agency’s existing acceptance of Verra’s afforestation, reforestation and revegetation methodology, VM0047, and its updated approach to Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, known as REDD+, under methodology VM0048. The move lands in the same month that the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market, known as ICVCM, extended its Core Carbon Principles, or CCP, label to another nine million forest credits at the American Carbon Registry, and as fresh issuance data shows buyers shifting hard toward labeled supply even as overall retirement volume cools.
A third forest methodology clears Singapore’s bar
Singapore’s carbon tax, which applies to large direct emitters, lets liable companies offset up to 5% of their taxable emissions using credits that the National Environment Agency has approved under the International Carbon Credit Framework. Verra said in its October 13 announcement that the agency continues to work with the registry to vet methodologies and registry infrastructure for use in the framework, and that eligibility for any given credit still depends on the bilateral implementation agreement Singapore has signed with the host country where the project sits. Verra put the current count of those agreements at 12, a list that has grown steadily since Singapore began signing them around the 2023 United Nations climate conference. VM0010 is now in its 1.3 version at Verra, with a 1.4 revision out for public consultation, and it covers projects that convert forest previously open to logging into protected status, crediting the carbon that stays standing as a result.
The CCP label keeps expanding its reach
The Singapore listing follows closely on a separate approval from ICVCM, which in August gave its Core Carbon Principles label to version 1.3 of the American Carbon Registry’s Improved Forest Management on Non-Federal U.S. Forestlands methodology, covering removal and emission reduction credits verified under the registry’s dynamic baseline tool. The American Carbon Registry, a nonprofit offset program, said the label will apply to more than nine million eligible credits already issued under that version. It is the fourth approval in a sequence that has moved through the registry’s forest methodologies over the past 15 months: the afforestation and reforestation methodology cleared in July 2025, version 2.1 of the non-federal forestlands methodology in August 2025, and version 2.0 in February 2026. Three more forest methodologies, covering small non-industrial private forestlands, Canadian forestlands and active conservation on U.S. forestlands, remain under ICVCM assessment. Taken together with Verra’s own CCP-seeking work on VM0047 and VM0048, the forest carbon segment of the voluntary market is now substantially organized around whether a given credit carries the label, not just which registry issued it.
Buyers are already voting with the label
That organization shows up in the trading data. Carbon Pulse reported on October 14, citing figures from data provider AlliedOffsets, that issuances of CCP-approved credits across the voluntary market rose 64% year over year in the first half of 2026, while issuances under methodologies ICVCM has rejected fell 67% over the same period. The same report found that combined retirements at Verra and the Gold Standard registry ran to about 67.4 million credits in the first half of the year, down roughly 9.3% from 74.3 million in the first half of 2025, with Verra accounting for more than 49 million of the total and Gold Standard about 17 million. Monthly retirements peaked near 20.3 million in February and bottomed around six million in January. The pattern is consistent with what forest project developers have described for more than a year: buyers are not necessarily retiring more credits, but they are increasingly selective about which ones.
Smaller landowners find a way into the registry
The forest management side of this story is not only about compliance frameworks and assessment panels. On August 27, 2026, the American Carbon Registry issued credits to the LandYield Small Scale Improved Forest Management Project 1, listed as ACR0831, which pools landowners across 13 southeastern states under the registry’s methodology for small non-industrial private forestlands. That methodology remains under separate ICVCM review and does not yet carry the Core Carbon Principles label, but the issuance matters for a different reason: it is one of the clearer examples this year of a carbon project structured specifically for family-forest owners who hold parcels too small to carry the transaction costs of a conventional improved forest management deal on their own. For a beat that tracks where carbon revenue actually reaches the stump, aggregated small-landowner projects are becoming as relevant as the large institutional deals that have dominated registry headlines.
What this means for the market
The two threads here, a national compliance buyer opening its books to more forest methodologies and a voluntary market consolidating around quality labels, point in the same direction without resolving the same tension. Singapore’s addition of VM0010 expands demand for a specific, fairly narrow category of improved forest management credit tied to logging-to-protection conversions, and it does so through a government process with its own additionality and leakage checks layered on top of Verra’s. That is a meaningful validation for developers working in that methodology, but it is a small slice of a market where overall retirement volume is still contracting year over year. The more durable signal is the issuance data: credits without a recognized quality label are losing share fast, and registries that can get their forest methodologies through ICVCM assessment, or onto a sovereign eligibility list like Singapore’s, are the ones positioning their project pipelines for the demand that remains.
What to watch now
Three things will clarify how far this trend runs. First, whether Verra’s VM0010 version 1.4, currently out for public consultation, finalizes before Singapore’s next review of its eligibility list, which would update the terms under which the newly listed methodology actually generates usable credits. Second, how the American Carbon Registry’s three remaining forest methodologies under ICVCM assessment, covering small non-industrial private forestlands, Canadian forestlands and active conservation, fare in the next round of decisions, since a label on the small-landowner methodology would directly affect projects like ACR0831. Third, whether full-year 2026 retirement figures, due from registries and data providers in the first weeks of 2027, confirm the first-half pattern of falling volume alongside rising CCP-approved share, or whether a fourth-quarter pickup in buying narrows the year-over-year gap. Forest project developers courting compliance-linked demand should treat a label, whether from ICVCM or a national framework like Singapore’s, as the baseline cost of being considered at all, not a differentiator.