Carbon credit intelligence
Three of the credentials most often cited to back a carbon-neutral claim are not what the company citing them thinks they are.
One has stopped taking new applicants, one is already flagged for its own replacement, and one no longer makes a carbon-neutral claim at all.
BSI stopped delivering the PAS 2060 scheme to new applicants from 1 January 2025, running a 24-month migration window from the November 2023 publication of its named successor, ISO 14068-1:2023. BSI’s own timeline gives 31 December 2025 as the date by which “all PAS 2060 verifications have been completed and verification opinion issued.” The NBS standards index lists PAS 2060:2014 as withdrawn and superseded by BS ISO 14068-1:2023; UKAS names the same 31 December 2025 date as its migration deadline.
The two-part trap.
A verification opinion issued for a past period stays valid for that period — a 2023 PAS 2060 statement was not a lie about 2023. It is simply worthless as a current credential, because nobody can be assessed against the standard today.
Never read “PAS 2060 certified” in the present tense; and do not swing the other way and claim an old opinion was invalidated — neither reading is right.
PAS 2060’s named successor, ISO 14068-1:2023 (Climate change management — Transition to net zero — Part 1: Carbon neutrality), was published in November 2023 as a 44-page, first-edition standard. It sets requirements for achieving and demonstrating carbon neutrality on a hierarchy that prioritises reductions and removals within the value chain ahead of offsetting. ISO itself certifies nobody: a third party verifies an organisation against the standard, and “ISO 14068-1 certified” is not a credential ISO issues.
ISO’s own catalogue record currently carries the standard at stage 90.92, “International Standard to be revised,” and names its successor — ISO 14068, without the “-1” — as under development. That successor, tracked separately in ISO’s catalogue as standard 94470, is itself under publication with a stated 2026 publication date, and it drops both the part number and the words “Transition to net zero” from the title, becoming simply “Climate change management — Carbon neutrality.” As at 20 August 2026, ISO 14068-1:2023 remains the published, in-force standard — it is superseded only once ISO 14068 actually publishes, not before — but it should never be cited as current without noting that it is flagged by ISO for revision, because the designation a search engine finds today will not be the one that is live within weeks of publication.
Climate Neutral Certified was replaced by The Climate Label, run by the same organisation, the Change Climate Project: the old label sunset at the end of 2024 and the new one went live in 2025. On the organisation’s own account this is a substantive change, not a rename — “we are moving away from a ‘carbon neutrality’ model” — and certified companies now demonstrate a threshold level of funding for climate projects, a Climate Transition Budget set at $15 per tonne for 2025, rather than matching emissions tonne for tonne. The Climate Label makes no carbon-neutrality claim at all.
Climate Neutral Certified badges printed before 2025 are still on packaging and websites, and will be for years. A reader who sees the badge and looks up the scheme finds a live organisation with a live label and reasonably assumes the badge is current.
It is not, and the live label behind it now certifies something else entirely — never describe Climate Neutral Certified as current, and never treat a Climate Label brand as making a carbon-neutral claim.
A company citing any of these three toward its own carbon-neutral marketing, or naming one as the verifying scheme behind carbon credits it plans to use, is answering a question UK SRS S2 paragraph 36(e)(ii) asks directly — which third-party scheme will verify or certify the credits. A scheme that has stopped taking applicants, or a badge that no longer makes the claim being cited, does not answer it. How that disclosure paragraph and the CMA’s Green Claims Code apply more broadly is covered in carbon credits in sustainability reporting.
An organisation that would rather set a genuine net-zero target than lean on a certification credential should start with what a transition plan needs to cover, not with a badge — see independent guidance on choosing a net zero consultant on sustainabilityreportingstandards.co.uk.
SRS Credit provides independent carbon credit risk analysis, including whether the certification standard behind a claim is still current.
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