How to size a market that barely exists

Top-down: from climate budgets to Category 1

Bottom-up: from tonnes to dollars

What the demand is actually made of

A structured estimate of the spend chasing verified Category 1 reductions — where it comes from, where it goes, and why it has no delivery rail.

Market-sizing in a category this young is an exercise in structured reasoning, not precision. The number that matters is not a decimal — it is an order of magnitude, and the order of magnitude here is tens of billions of dollars a year in corporate spend aimed at reductions that most current instruments cannot credibly deliver.

This analysis lays out how that figure is built, what it is composed of, and why the constraint on the market is not demand or willingness to pay — it is the absence of a delivery mechanism that survives audit.

Two methods are available for a category like this, and honest sizing uses both as a cross-check. The top-down method starts from total corporate climate spend and narrows to the slice aimed at supply-chain reductions. The bottom-up method starts from the emissions themselves — the tonnes that have to be addressed — and applies a plausible price per tonne. When two independent methods land in the same neighborhood, the neighborhood is probably real.

The purpose is not to produce a headline figure to be quoted out of context. It is to show where the money is — which flows are large, which are growing, and which are stranded for lack of an instrument to spend them through.