Absolute Climate and Northern Trust Offer Capabilities to Support Independent Certification and Lifecycle Management for Digital Carbon Credits
SAN FRANCISCO and CHICAGO, Sept. 09, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Absolute Climate, the first independent quality assurance provider built to serve the entire carbon removal industry, and Northern Trust (NASDAQ:NTRS) are offering capabilities that support access to regulated credit issuance. This approach allows project developers to pair third-party certification with independent governance and access infrastructure for managing credits through their full lifecycle.
The initiative helps bridge a long-standing gap in carbon markets by aligning independent certification with a regulated system for issuing credits. Project developers using Absolute Climate's monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) platform can record credits through the Northern Trust Carbon Ecosystem™, which provides a digital platform for project developers and buyers to explore, transact and retire voluntary carbon credits.
"This is how carbon markets should work," said Peter Minor, CEO of Absolute Climate. "Definitions of quality and governance standards should be developed independently from those issuing credits. By pairing our neutral, third-party certification framework with Northern Trust's sophisticated market infrastructure, we're building the kind of market architecture that allows buyers to trust credits and developers to operate with clarity."
Absolute Climate serves as a third-party quality and governance partner to both project developers and registries. Its platform supports developers across a wide range of carbon removal methods, and helps projects design and deploy credible MRV plans, align with rigorous methodologies, and generate the structured data needed to meet regulatory-grade standards. Absolute Climate's certification framework is designed to be registry-neutral and fully compatible with multiple platforms.
Northern Trust announced the launch of The Northern Trust Carbon Ecosystem in September 2024, to provide an automated ecosystem, giving carbon avoidance and removal project developers and institutional buyers confidence and transparency through the lifecycle of their voluntary carbon credit transactions.
Justin Chapman, Group Head of Strategic Partnerships, Digital Assets and Financial Markets, at Northern Trust, said: "We are pleased to be able to collaborate with Absolute Climate. Working with governance providers who are looking to separate responsibilities in the carbon credit value chain supports further maturity of the Voluntary Carbon Market."
By working together, Absolute Climate and Northern Trust are advancing a new model for carbon markets by separating the roles of standard-setting from credit recordation, combining science-based certification with institutional-quality solutions, and supporting transparency throughout the full credit lifecycle.
About The Northern Trust Carbon Ecosystem™
The Northern Trust Carbon Ecosystem™, offered through The Northern Trust Company in Chicago, is a fully digital carbon ecosystem for the end-to-end lifecycle management of digital voluntary carbon credits. Powered by the Northern Trust Matrix Zenith™ digital assets platform, it offers secure and transparent lifecycle management of voluntary carbon credit transactions. The Northern Trust Carbon Ecosystem is owned and managed by Northern Trust, one of the world's leading providers of wealth management, asset servicing, asset management, and banking. It has a global presence with offices in 24 U.S. states and Washington D.C. and 22 locations in Canada, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific. For more than 135 years, Northern Trust has earned distinction as an industry leader for exceptional service, financial expertise, integrity, and innovation. For more information, please visit northerntrust.com/carbon-ecosystem.
About Absolute Climate
Absolute Climate is accelerating market adoption of carbon removal through the first universal standard that assesses and verifies carbon credits independent of registries. The Absolute Carbon Standard enables registries to independently apply consistent, science-based evaluations across all carbon removal pathways and issue credits that reflect true carbon impact. By separating the roles of standard-setting and credit issuance, Absolute Climate eliminates conflicts of interest to ensure that credit quality aligns with genuine climate outcomes rather than market pressures. Founded by experts in measurement, verification, and reporting, Absolute Climate is helping scale carbon markets to achieve gigatonne-level impact.
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