COMPASS stands for Carbon Offset Monitoring to Accelerate Sustainable Societies. The Max Planck Research Group Leader Benedict Probst aims to build the first system-wide, near real-time assessment of global carbon offset markets. The project will be funded for five years.
ERC Starting Grants are among the most competitive research awards in Europe. The grants support outstanding researchers at an early stage of their independent careers in pursuing high-risk, high-gain projects of their own design.
A Market Built on Promises That Are Hard to Check
Carbon offsetting is based on a simple concept. A company or a country that has difficulty or finds it expensive to cut its own emissions pays for emissions to be avoided or removed elsewhere – such as by protecting a forest in the Amazon, distributing efficient cookstoves in Kenya, or building a solar plant in India – and counts those avoided tons against its own climate target. Each ton is certified as a “carbon credit” by a standard-setting organization such as the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism or the privately run registry Verra.
The problem is that the product being sold is potentially something that did not happen. Buyers often cannot inspect it, and the evidence increasingly suggests that many credits do not hold up. In an international meta-analysis, published in Nature Communications in 2024, researchers led by Benedict Probst examined carbon credits amounting to roughly one billion tons of CO₂ – about one-fifth of all credits issued up to that point. Fewer than 16 percent represented genuine emission reductions. The gap between what was claimed and what was delivered amounted to 812 million tons of CO₂, surpassing Germany’s annual greenhouse gas emissions.
Despite these findings, offsets are shifting from the periphery of corporate sustainability reports to the center of climate policy. The European Union’s 2040 climate target illustrates the stakes: relative to earlier aspirations, it permits around 50 percent higher domestic emissions and expects international offsets to bridge the difference.
“Offsets are no longer a niche instrument for green marketing; they are becoming a mainstay to national and corporate climate plans. If they underperform, we are not buying climate action; we are quietly lowering our ambitions. My concern is not that offsets are imperfect. It is that we are building policy on top of them without any reliable way of knowing whether they work,” says Benedict Probst.
Why Today’s Quality Checks Cannot Steer the Market
Proponents argue that growing scrutiny, new reform initiatives, and a wave of private rating agencies are already improving quality. However, Probst’s starting point is that we currently have no comprehensive way of knowing. He argues that existing assessments suffer from three structural flaws.
- They are isolated: they examine individual projects one at a time, without asking who developed them, who audited them, who bought the credits, or how these relationships affect quality.
- They are inaccessible: the decisive information is buried in tens of thousands of pages of unstructured project documents and corporate reports that hardly anyone reads.
- They are infrequent: rigorous studies take years, by which time the credits have long been sold, used, and retired.
“Today’s quality checks are a bit like inspecting a handful of restaurants once a decade, and never asking who trains the inspectors or who pays them. COMPASS shifts the question from ‘Was this one project any good?’ to ‘Is this system moving in the right direction, and who benefits when it is not?’,” says Benedict Probst.
What COMPASS Will Do
1. Map the players. It will identify who develops, audits, rates, and buys credits, as well as which combinations of actors keep producing weak projects.
2. Open up the evidence. Large language models examine thousands of project documents and corporate reports, extracting the assumptions behind every claim.
3. Check supply and demand. It will recalculate the claimed mitigation outcomes for various project types and compare thousands of companies’ credit purchases with their actual decarbonization.
4. Test the reforms. It will establish whether reform initiatives break up problematic structures, or whether actors who benefit from low standards simply adapt.
“Success for me is not just another paper showing that offsets underperform. Success is when a regulator, a company, or a journalist can look up whether this market is improving, and see the evidence behind the answer. If we find that the reforms are working, we should speak up just as loudly,” says Benedict Probst.
About the Net Zero Lab
Benedict Probst has headed the Net Zero Lab at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition since May 2024, as an independent Max Planck Research Group within the Department of Innovation and Entrepreneurship Research led by Dietmar Harhoff. The goal of the Net Zero Lab is to accelerate the development of green technologies that are crucial for replacing fossil fuels in industry as well as of technologies that directly remove CO₂ from the air.
About the ERC and the Starting Grant Competition
The ERC, set up by the European Union in 2007, is the premier European funding organization for excellent frontier research. It funds creative researchers of any nationality and age, to run projects based across Europe. The winning projects of the 2026 Starting Grant competition will cover a broad spectrum of research fields from life sciences and engineering to social sciences and humanities. The funding, worth €705 million in total, will go to 421 early-career researchers across Europe. A Starting Grant provides up to 1.5 million euros over a maximum period of five years. A record of 4,807 proposals were submitted to this competition, up 22 percent from 3,928 last year’s call. Only 8.8 percent of this year’s submissions were awarded funding. The increased demand for funding was also reflected in the number of applications from researchers based outside Europe. In particular, 169 US-based researchers applied, compared to 116 in the previously call. Several European researchers who applied from outside the EU and Horizon Europe associated countries will now move to Europe to pursue their research.
Further information
Go to the Net Zero Lab
Go to the European Research Council (ERC)