Trust Is the Product: What Finland's Land Registry Can Teach Carbon Markets

The carbon credit market has a demand problem that looks, on the surface, like an abundance of opportunity.

That was the view Marko Kärkkäinen brought to TechEX, where he spoke about his work leading global expansion for Carboreal Oyj, a Finnish company building forest-based carbon credit programs. Kärkkäinen is a serial entrepreneur who spent fifteen years in Asia before returning to Finland, moving through waste management and rescue vehicles before landing back in environmental business.

His argument, in short: the world doesn't lack buyers for carbon credits. It lacks credits anyone can actually trust.

"We can't sell our carbon credits like a double time or triple time, which has happened."

The market is mainstream, the trust isn't

Kärkkäinen was blunt about why companies hesitate. Carbon credit markets have been burned before — projects sold, promises made, results that never materialized. "There has been this kind of problem with the other projects... maybe they haven't done it, so the result hasn't been what they have promised," he said. That history follows every new entrant into the space, including Carboreal.

At the same time, demand is accelerating. Google's €13 billion data center investment in Finland, he noted, has already created friction — forests cut down without full permissions — and with it, urgency around credible offsetting. Scope three emissions compensation is becoming a standing item for municipalities, governments and corporates across Europe. "There is a lot of companies and entities who need the carbon credits and, like, a scope three," he said.

Finland's land registry as a competitive moat

Carboreal's answer to the trust problem isn't a certification badge — it's infrastructure most competitors can't replicate. Finland's government-level land registry lets the company dedicate purchased farmland to carbon credit programs for 70 to 90 years, with legal certainty that the land stays dedicated to that purpose.

"When we buy a land from farmers... and we set up this carbon credits program, that area is dedicated for that purpose," he said. "The customers who are dealing with us, they know that it's really happening, and it's really stayed there."

That registry, paired with Finland's reputation for transparency and its deep history in forestry economics, is the differentiator Kärkkäinen leans on most heavily — ahead of any technical process.

Certification is necessary, but not sufficient

Carboreal uses ISO standards and is working towards the EU wide CRCF certifications, as well. But Kärkkäinen was candid that certification alone hasn't solved the credibility problem — because some certified projects are among those that failed to deliver.

"There is also a lot of things happening on that side as well, that there has been... some problems," he said of Verra and Gold-standard projects. Many tenders require those standards regardless, which locks Carboreal out of some government contracts while it builds its certification track record.

Monitoring is its own technical constraint. Satellite imagery isn't precise enough to track small forest parcels in their first three to five years, so Carboreal currently relies on drones, with satellite integration planned as pixel resolution improves.

A deliberately mixed founding team

Kärkkäinen pointed repeatedly to the composition of Carboreal's founders as a source of credibility rather than a soft detail. The team includes a working farmer, an investment banker, carbon credit scientists and staff as young as 22 or 23.

"One of the founders is a farmer, a real farmer," he said. "One of the founders is investment banker background... then we have a lot of members who are very skilled professionals around carbon credits and its management." He called the mix "refreshing" — grounding the scientific and financial sides of the business in someone who actually works the land.

Scaling within strict limits

Carboreal's expansion plan stays close to its origin story rather than chasing scale for its own sake. The company has opened an office in Sweden, with government tenders and corporate buyers across Europe as the next target — but it is not trying to be first everywhere.

• Government tenders in Germany and other EU countries, many requiring Verra or Gold Standard certification
• Data center operators seeking to offset land-use impact, particularly in Finland and the Nordics
• Corporates needing scope three travel and operations offsets
• Municipalities and regulators shaping EU-level carbon credit frameworks
• Partners in countries that lack Finland's land-registry infrastructure

Kärkkäinen's colleague based in Australia is tracking a market he says is ahead of Europe on carbon credit regulation — intelligence Carboreal is using to anticipate where EU policy moves next.

What he's actually listening for

Asked what he looks for at industry events, Kärkkäinen didn't describe deal-hunting. He described listening. "I want to learn a lot of how people think and how they create when I'm telling them what we are doing," he said, citing a conversation with a Turkcell representative as a recent example — someone from an entirely different industry, useful precisely because her perspective was unfamiliar.

That instinct — go abroad, learn, listen — is also the advice he'd give his younger self, distilled from fifteen years in Asia into three words.

The takeaway

Carbon credits don't fail because buyers don't exist. They fail because buyers have been burned before, and verification is slow by nature. Carboreal's bet is that the fix isn't a faster certificate — it's infrastructure that makes fraud structurally difficult, paired with a team that can't be accused of selling a product they don't understand.

"Real forest, real impact."

Whether that bet scales beyond Finland's borders will depend less on marketing than on whether other countries can offer anything like the same legal guarantees.

Interview

• Marko Kärkkäinen — Global expansion lead, Carboreal Oyj

Event

• TechEX