The hardest problem in consumer climate action has never been willingness. People will pay for good outcomes — every survey says so and, more importantly, so does our booking data. The hard problem is believability. When a customer funds an offset, what exactly did they buy, who says so, and who is accountable if the answer is "not much"?
That is why the development reported by Business Plus this July matters more than its size suggests: IMPT is set to become the first registered intermediary under the Generalitat de Catalunya's Climate Credit system. Not a partnership press release, not a marketing badge — a registered role inside a system a European regional government designed and supervises.
The voluntary market's trust gap
The voluntary carbon market has spent a decade fighting a credibility war, and mostly losing it in public. Investigations into forest credits that would have stood anyway, methodologies that shifted under buyers' feet, brokers holding margins nobody could see — anyone who works in this space honestly has to start from that record, not pretend it away.
The standard answers — better methodologies, more audits, satellite verification — all help. But they share a weakness: they are private answers to a public-trust question. A rating agency can tell you a credit is probably sound. It cannot make anyone accountable to a citizen.
What a government registry changes
A climate-credit system run by a government changes three things at once.
First, the registry is public infrastructure. Who issued what, to whom, retired when — held by an institution that answers to voters, not to the seller. The double-counting problem, which quietly haunts voluntary credits, becomes an administrative impossibility rather than a promise.
Second, the projects are local and inspectable. Catalonia's system is built around verified local climate action. A credit tied to a project a regulator can drive to is a different instrument from a credit tied to a hectare nobody involved has ever seen.
Third, intermediaries are registered, not self-declared. To move these credits to consumers you must be inside the system, with obligations. That is precisely the accountability layer the voluntary market lacked.
Why this matters for travel
Travel is one of the few consumer categories where the emissions are honest — a flight and a hotel night have a footprint no one disputes — and where the purchase moment is big enough to carry real climate funding. At IMPT we put a tonne of verified CO₂ offsetting behind hotel bookings across 8 million hotels and apartments, funded from our commission rather than added to the guest's bill. The Sunday Times described the model as a booking app "built for good people" — but good intentions only compound when the credits underneath are unimpeachable.
Regional-government systems like Catalonia's are, I believe, the template: climate finance that a consumer can check the way they check a land registry. The first movers into those systems will set the standards everyone else inherits — the fact discipline, the retirement proofs, the reporting formats.
What I'd tell other founders
If your product touches climate claims, get inside a supervised system early, even when the voluntary route is easier. The cost of registration is real; the cost of a decade defending unsupervised claims is far higher. The market is separating into companies that can show a registry entry and companies that can show a PDF. Be the first kind.
Common questions
What is the Generalitat de Catalunya's Climate Credit system?
A climate-credit framework created by Catalonia's regional government, built around verified local climate projects with a government-supervised registry, in which intermediaries must be formally registered.
What is IMPT's role in it?
As reported by Business Plus in July 2026, IMPT is set to become the first registered intermediary under the system — the layer that brings the government-verified credits to everyday consumers.
How is a government climate credit different from a voluntary carbon credit?
The registry is public infrastructure, projects are locally verifiable, and sellers are registered with obligations — accountability a purely voluntary credit cannot offer.