Tech and Energy Giants Form Dual Carbon Buying Coalitions Targeting 30 Million Tonnes by 2030

The voluntary carbon market (VCM) — which has contracted by more than two-thirds since its 2020–2021 peak — received a significant demand signal this month with the back-to-back launch of two major purchasing coalitions. VnEconomy, citing BloombergNEF, reports that corporate credit purchases in 2025 fell to 153.5 million tCO₂, the lowest since 2020, as average spot prices declined 20% from the 2023 high to $4.8 per tonne. The retreat is attributed to a string of integrity scandals, most notably a Zimbabwe forest-protection project that supplied credits to several global consumer brands before the majority of those credits were found to lack genuine climate benefit; the LEAF Coalition’s $180 million arrangement with Brazil’s Pará state is also under legal challenge, with critics labelling it a greenwashing exercise.

Against that backdrop, the Action for a Resilient Climate (ARC) Coalition made its formal debut at the GenZero 2026 Summit in Singapore, uniting Tencent Holdings, CATL, Mitsubishi Corporation, Osaka Gas, Vale SA, Rubicon Carbon, WWF Singapore and Enterprise Singapore, with Bain & Company, Climate Impact X and GenZero — a Temasek-owned climate investment entity — providing support. ARC is structured around three pillars: a collective commitment to purchase 10 million tonnes of carbon credits by 2030; a blended-finance facility drawing on public, private and non-profit capital to fund early-stage carbon projects across Asia; and transparency standards built around the ICVCM framework. The coalition’s Asia focus is presented as a deliberate response to the region’s documented difficulty in accessing international climate finance despite strong underlying project demand.

Simultaneously, the Symbiosis Coalition — founded by Google, Meta, Microsoft and Salesforce, with Bain & Company and REI Co-op joining as additional members — is targeting 20 million tonnes of high-quality, nature-based carbon removal credits by 2030. Its first global request-for-proposals process reviewed 185 projects across more than 40 countries and over 6.6 million hectares, requiring eligible projects to demonstrate removal capacity of at least 500,000 tCO₂ by 2035. Symbiosis named Mombak’s large-scale reforestation of degraded Amazonian pastureland in Brazil as its inaugural contracted project; Google and McKinsey purchased 215,000 tonnes of removal credits from Mombak under the coalition framework, while Microsoft had separately committed to 1.5 million tonnes from the same project before Symbiosis formally launched. The coalition has also facilitated contracts covering more than 130,000 credits from Living Carbon’s Appalachian reforestation project in the United States, which deploys advanced biotechnology to enhance tree carbon uptake. VnEconomy notes that highest-quality credits climbed 25% to $7.3 per tonne in 2025 even as the broader market stagnated, which the article interprets as evidence that quality differentiation is beginning to take hold. Looking ahead, analysts cited in the piece describe 2026 as a potential watershed year, pointing to the finalisation of Article 6 rules at COP29 and COP30, the anticipated launch of the Paris Agreement Crediting Mechanism, and SBTi work on updated guidance for corporate use of credits in net-zero pathways.