First CORSIA credits tagged, sold, retired

For a long time, CORSIA felt like a market being built in approvals, consultations, and working groups. This quarter, it began to look more like a market.

In our last newsletter, I shared that Oka had insured the first Gold Standard-issued credits via BURN. In January, DelAgua became the first developer to have credits tagged as CORSIA-eligible by Verra, with 4,776,194 credits labelled across projects in Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and The Gambia. That matters in its own right. It also matters for what sits behind it. Oka insured the first Verra-tagged credits through our work with DelAgua, helping turn a regulatory pathway into real supply.

That shift was the focus of the recent event we co-hosted with DelAgua. The question is no longer whether CORSIA will progress, but rather how quickly supply can reach buyers and where friction still sits. Some of that friction remains very real, with slow approvals constricting near-term supply and putting upwards pressure on prices. For developers with access, the commercial opportunity is substantial.

The demand side is starting to show up more clearly, too. Last month saw the first large-scale retirement of CORSIA credits by a commercial carrier, Japan Airlines, including 50,000 issued by BURN. Joining an International Air Transport Association (IATA) CORSIA workshop in March, our CPO Stewart Duncan noted that airlines, while still cautious, are now investing seriously in project research and credit procurement, building on the progress I observed at Aviation Carbon conference in November.

Supply is coming through. Buyers are beginning to act. Our own pipeline is opening up alongside that progress, as the next phase comes into view.

New partnerships, insurance applications

This week, we announced a new partnership with Greenlight Innovation Syndicate 3456 to support the growth of our green credit insurance business. By combining Oka’s specialist underwriting expertise in green and transition finance with Greenlight Re’s Lloyd’s platform, we're adding capacity to a market where risk transfer is critical to execution.

“Oka has built a clear value proposition in this space, underpinned by specialist underwriting and disciplined risk selection. Greenlight Re is pleased to provide support through its Lloyd’s platform to help scale the offering."

_{Brian O'Reilly, Greenlight Re's Head of Innovations}

Over the quarter, we welcomed a number of new clients across adjacent parts of the carbon ecosystem, including Bridge Carbon, SPOUTS, GasGreen Asia, and Global Cookstoves Ltd. Oka also partnered with 1089 and Price Forbes to launch an insured carbon asset framework for transportation and energy, bringing Lloyd’s-backed risk transfer to the highest-impact decarbonisation sectors. From the outset, our thesis has been that carbon credits require embedded invalidation-risk cover to attract institutional capital; this collaboration marked an important step towards making that the benchmark.

Underpinning these new partnerships is a familiar common thread: practical demand for risk infrastructure that helps projects, assets, and transactions move more cleanly and efficiently through the market. Taken together, they tell us something useful about where we are. Insurance demand is no longer confined to one narrow use case. It is appearing in more parts of the market, and in more commercially specific ways.

Strengthening Oka’s market position

In February, we welcomed Michael Naylor to the Oka board. Michael has deep experience across sustainable infrastructure and energy transition ventures, as prior chair of the Jupiter Green Investment Trust and co-founder of Ocior Energy, founding shareholder of Sun Mobility, and advisor to sustainable infrastructure investors. As we scale, that combination of operating and investment experience will be hugely valuable.

Over the quarter, our team has been spending more time in the rooms where market-defining decisions are made. In addition to Stewart attending IATA’s workshop in March, our Active Underwriter Sima Adhya joined a CORSIA panel at ITC London in January, our SVP of Growth, Zachary Kane, lectured for a sustainability cohort through Yale University, and Stewart and I are currently in Barcelona for IETA’s European Climate Summit, where I spoke on the panel “Scaling CORSIA in 2026: Challenges and Opportunities Affecting the Market”.

Across these forums, speakers and audiences are circling the same questions: how supply gets to market, how buyers get comfortable, how risk is shared, and how the infrastructure continues to mature. Oka is not just a party to but an active voice and leading driver in these conversations.

Recognition from outside carbon

This has been a quarter of welcome recognition. Oka was shortlisted at the British Insurance Awards for Insurance Startup of the Year, due, in large part, to our market-leading work on CORSIA. Sima, who was spotlighted for International Women’s Day, has also been nominated for this year’s Women in Insurance Awards.

Awards are not the work itself, obviously. Even so, they are a useful signal that carbon and climate transition insurance is increasingly being treated as a serious category.

What comes next

The clearest signal from Q1 is that CORSIA is beginning to behave like a live market. Tagged supply is arriving. Retirements are happening. Developers, registries, insurers, and buyers are now working through the operational detail. Our job at Oka is to keep reducing friction to support scale. That means helping more supply come to market, building more routes for capital to participate, and ensuring that insurance capacity supports growth rather than becoming another bottleneck layered on top of it. The opportunity remains substantial. It now also feels tangible.