<b>The failed promise of the Voluntary Carbon Market: Evaluating the community-level impac

A dataset investigating the voluntary carbon market investments of the top 50 Global Fortune 500 companies. It includes verification of investments, project types, destination countries, and a literature review categorizing community-level impacts into five themes. The dataset was authored by Serena Finger and last updated on 2026-05-04.

Use Cases

• Analyzing corporate participation in the voluntary carbon market based on confirmed project reports.
• Evaluating the community-level impacts (positive/negative) of carbon offset projects based on the five categorized themes.
• Mapping the flow of carbon credit investments from company countries of origin to project destination countries.
• Studying the relationship between project types and reported community outcomes.

Strengths

• Focuses on a specific, high-profile group of 50 companies from the Global Fortune 500 list.
• Includes two layers of verification for investments and a categorized literature review of project impacts.
• Released under a permissive CC-BY-4.0 license, allowing for broad reuse and sharing.

Limitations

• Row count and column-level documentation are unknown, which limits suitability assessment.
• The dataset is small (50.6 KB), suggesting a limited scope or aggregated summary-level data.
• Description metadata is limited; actual data quality and field semantics require manual inspection after download.

Provenance

Source

figshare, authored by Serena Finger.

Collection Method

Data collection and literature review of company reports and projects.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-04 21:09:24; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Projects have global destination countries; companies are from various countries of origin.