Who is financing carbon removal and how is it being executed.

Apportioned credit

A provider that disclosed its own amount is credited with that amount. Whatever is left of the transaction is split evenly between the other providers on it. (On a US$100m loan where one lender disclosed US$60m, that lender takes US$60m and the other US$40m is shared between the rest.)

Transaction counts stay whole. Being one of five lenders earns one transaction, never a fifth of one. A provider's value and its count answer two different questions, and we never trade one off against the other.

We also work out full credit, where every provider on a transaction is credited with the whole of it. We use it to check the arithmetic and we never publish it as a ranking. It comes to more than the market total by design (that is simply what happens when five lenders are each given the whole of the same loan), and it is the usual way a league table flatters a bank.

What is ranked

Closed transactions with a named provider, at project developer or project level. Each provider is ranked for the instrument it actually supplied: equity and M&A together, debt on its own, grants on their own.

Debt includes pre-purchases (credits paid for before they are delivered), streaming and outcome bonds, because in each the money reaches the project before the carbon does. Each is labelled with its type, and the Type filter on the debt ranking shows each on its own.

Grants sit apart because concessional money is not chasing the same return as commercial money. Adding the two together would imply that it is.

Fund raises are also included in the funds tab but left out of deployed capital.

What is left out

Transactions that have been announced but have not closed are counted separately, as is anything outside carbon project finance.

Arrangers, bookrunners and structuring agents are ranked on their own, under Arranged. They put the transaction together without putting money in, so their figures are never added to the Provided table. (A bank that both arranged and lent appears in both, with a different number in each, and the two are never summed.)

A guarantor is not a lender. Credit support is recorded so you can see who stands behind a facility, which is often more revealing than who advanced the money, but it ranks nowhere and is left out of the apportionment entirely.

How totals and incomplete disclosure are accounted for

Every value total is published with the number of transactions behind it, because a total on its own can be made to say almost anything.

A transaction whose value was never made public reads as Undisclosed. Never a zero, never a dash. (An undisclosed transaction and a small one are different facts, and showing either as nothing would confuse the two.)

Some transactions were priced in tonnes rather than cash. Those read as a tonnage, because the volume is disclosed even though no cash figure is, and they are counted as transactions without carrying value.

Only sized transactions carry value, so a pathway funded entirely on undisclosed terms will not appear in any value ranking, though it still appears in the counts.

Every dollar of the market total is either credited to a capital provider or counted here: US$8.84m across 3 ranked transactions names no provider at all, and on 3 further transactions US$3.75m is more than the named providers account for. The three sum to the market total exactly, which is what makes the provider tables comparable.

Completeness

Where a transaction is still missing something, such as its size, a party or its date, its own page says so in one line. A transaction with a gap is still ranked where it qualifies: we would rather rank it and tell you what is missing than quietly leave it out.