Watershed's 2026 Carbon Removal Request for Proposals has sent a clear signal to the procurement world: sustainability is no longer a nice-to-have feature in vendor selection — it's becoming a core criterion that shapes how organizations spend their money, choose their partners, and define their long-term value. For procurement professionals and business owners who want to stay ahead of this curve, understanding how to structure and leverage RFPs for eco-friendly initiatives is no longer optional. It's a competitive necessity.
What Is the Watershed 2026 Carbon Removal RFP?
Watershed, the enterprise climate platform trusted by hundreds of major corporations, has opened its 2026 Carbon Removal Request for Proposals round. This initiative invites carbon removal project developers and suppliers to submit proposals for high-quality carbon removal credits. The goal is to match corporate buyers — companies that have made net-zero commitments — with credible, science-backed carbon removal solutions.
What makes this RFP round particularly significant is not just the volume of carbon credits being sought. It's the rigorous evaluation framework Watershed applies to every submission. Proposals are assessed based on permanence, additionality, measurability, and co-benefits such as biodiversity and community impact. In other words, Watershed isn't just buying carbon offsets — it's running a procurement process that prioritizes quality, transparency, and long-term environmental integrity.
This is exactly the kind of approach that procurement teams across every industry should be studying and, where applicable, adapting to their own contexts.
Why Sustainability Is Reshaping Procurement Processes
The rise of sustainability-focused RFPs like Watershed's isn't happening in a vacuum. Several powerful forces are converging to push environmental considerations to the center of procurement decisions.
Regulatory Pressure Is Mounting
In the European Union, the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) now requires thousands of companies to disclose detailed information about their environmental impact, including their supply chains. In the United States, the SEC's climate disclosure rules — though still evolving — are pushing publicly listed companies toward greater transparency about climate-related risks. Governments in Asia, Canada, and Australia are moving in similar directions.
For procurement teams, this means that the vendors and suppliers you choose are no longer just operational decisions. They're compliance decisions. If your suppliers have poor environmental track records, that exposure can become your exposure.
Buyers Are Demanding It
Corporate buyers, institutional investors, and even individual consumers are increasingly scrutinizing the sustainability credentials of the companies they do business with. A 2023 Deloitte survey found that sustainability performance is now a key factor in supplier selection for a majority of large enterprises. This trend has only accelerated since then.
Carbon Commitments Are Becoming Contractual
Many organizations that have made public net-zero pledges are now embedding those commitments into their procurement frameworks. That means suppliers who cannot demonstrate a credible emissions reduction pathway risk being disqualified — not on price or quality grounds, but on sustainability grounds.
What Procurement Professionals Can Learn from Watershed's Approach
Whether you're sourcing carbon removal credits, office supplies, IT services, or construction contractors, the principles behind Watershed's RFP process offer valuable lessons.
Define Your Sustainability Criteria Clearly and Early
One of the most common mistakes in sustainability-focused procurement is treating environmental criteria as an afterthought — something tacked onto the end of a standard RFP template. Watershed's approach inverts this. Sustainability requirements are embedded from the very beginning, shaping what kinds of vendors are even eligible to respond.
When drafting your next RFP, consider moving your sustainability requirements to the front of the document, not the back. Define what you mean by "sustainable." Are you focused on carbon emissions? Water usage? Waste reduction? Fair labor practices? Biodiversity? The more specific you are, the more useful the responses you'll receive — and the easier it will be to compare vendors objectively.
Use Measurable, Verifiable Standards
Watershed evaluates carbon removal proposals against scientific frameworks and third-party verification standards. This is critical. Vague sustainability language — "we are committed to being green" — is essentially meaningless in a procurement context. What you want from vendors are specific, verifiable claims backed by recognized standards.
In your RFP, require vendors to reference concrete frameworks such as:
- ISO 14001 (Environmental Management Systems)
- Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) commitments
- GHG Protocol reporting standards
- B Corp certification or equivalent
- CDP (Carbon Disclosure Project) scores
By anchoring your sustainability evaluation to recognized external standards, you reduce the risk of greenwashing and make your scoring process far more defensible.
Weight Sustainability Appropriately in Scoring
Many procurement teams include sustainability criteria in their RFP scoring rubrics but assign them a token weighting — say, 5% of the total score. If sustainability is genuinely important to your organization, that weighting needs to reflect it. Watershed doesn't treat environmental quality as a tiebreaker. It's a primary evaluation dimension.
Consider whether your current scoring model actually incentivizes sustainable behavior. If a vendor can score 95% on price and quality while scoring zero on sustainability and still win the contract, your RFP isn't really a sustainability-focused procurement process — it's a conventional one with green window dressing.
Ask the Right Questions
The questions you include in your RFP determine the quality of the information you receive. For sustainability-focused procurement, generic questions will yield generic answers. Instead, ask vendors to respond to specific, scenario-based prompts such as:
- "Describe your current Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions and your reduction targets for the next three years."
- "What third-party certifications or audits have you undergone in the past 24 months related to environmental performance?"
- "How do you manage sustainability risks within your own supply chain?"
- "Provide a case study of a sustainability improvement you implemented in the past two years and its measurable outcome."
These kinds of questions force vendors to provide substantive, verifiable responses rather than boilerplate sustainability statements.
Building a Sustainability-First RFP: A Practical Framework
For procurement professionals ready to take action, here is a practical framework for building sustainability considerations into your next RFP from the ground up.
Step 1: Align Internally Before You Draft
Before you write a single line of your RFP, make sure your internal stakeholders — legal, finance, operations, and executive leadership — are aligned on what sustainability means for your organization and how much weight it should carry in vendor selection. Without this internal alignment, sustainability criteria often get watered down during the approval process.
Step 2: Map Your Sustainability Priorities
Not all sustainability issues are equally relevant to every procurement category. A facilities management RFP will have different environmental priorities than a software development RFP. Map out the specific environmental dimensions that are most material to the category you're sourcing. This keeps your RFP focused and prevents you from overwhelming vendors with irrelevant questions.
Step 3: Draft Your Requirements with Precision
This is where tools and templates can save significant time. AI-powered platforms like CreateYourRFP can help procurement teams quickly generate structured, professional RFP documents that incorporate sustainability requirements alongside standard commercial and technical criteria. Rather than starting from a blank page — or worse, copying from an outdated template — you can work from a solid foundation and customize it to your specific needs.
The key at this stage is precision. Every sustainability requirement in your RFP should be specific enough that a vendor knows exactly what they need to demonstrate to meet it.
Step 4: Build a Robust Evaluation Rubric
Define your scoring criteria before you issue the RFP, not after you receive responses. This protects against unconscious bias and ensures that sustainability performance is evaluated consistently across all submissions. If you're using a weighted scoring model, document the rationale for each weighting decision so you can defend it if challenged.
Step 5: Plan for Ongoing Monitoring
Winning the RFP is just the beginning. Sustainability commitments made during the proposal stage need to be tracked and verified throughout the contract lifecycle. Build monitoring and reporting requirements into your contract terms. Require annual sustainability performance reports from vendors. Include provisions that allow you to audit environmental claims.
The Broader Opportunity: Using RFPs as a Lever for Change
Here's something that's easy to overlook in the day-to-day mechanics of procurement: RFPs are one of the most powerful tools organizations have to drive behavior change in their supply chains.
When Watershed issues a carbon removal RFP with rigorous scientific criteria, it doesn't just select good vendors. It sends a market signal that raises the bar for the entire carbon removal industry. Suppliers who want access to Watershed's buyers have to meet those standards — or invest in improving their practices to meet them in the future.
The same dynamic applies to your organization, regardless of your size or sector. When you issue an RFP that takes sustainability seriously, you are:
- Signaling to the market what you value and what you expect
- Rewarding suppliers who have invested in sustainable practices
- Creating incentives for other suppliers to improve their environmental performance
- Protecting your organization from reputational and regulatory risk
- Building a supply chain that is more resilient to future climate-related disruptions
This is why getting your RFP right matters so much. A well-designed, sustainability-focused RFP isn't just a procurement document. It's a statement of organizational values and a mechanism for driving positive change at scale.
Common Pitfalls to Avoid
Even well-intentioned sustainability-focused RFPs can fall short if they're not carefully designed. Here are some of the most common mistakes to watch out for.
Greenwashing by proxy. Accepting vague sustainability commitments from vendors without requiring verification is essentially endorsing greenwashing. Always require evidence, not just assertions.
Sustainability theater. Including sustainability criteria that have no real impact on vendor selection undermines the credibility of your process. If you ask sustainability questions, make sure the answers actually influence your decision.
Ignoring Scope 3 emissions. For many organizations, the majority of their carbon footprint sits in their supply chain — what's known as Scope 3 emissions. An RFP that only asks about a vendor's direct emissions misses most of the picture.
One-size-fits-all requirements. Small and medium-sized enterprises may not have the resources to produce the same level of sustainability documentation as large corporations. Consider whether your requirements inadvertently exclude capable, genuinely sustainable smaller suppliers.
Failing to update your templates. Sustainability standards and best practices evolve quickly. An RFP template that was state-of-the-art two years ago may already be outdated. Review and refresh your procurement templates regularly.
The Future of Sustainable Procurement
Watershed's 2026 Carbon Removal RFP is a glimpse of where procurement is heading. As carbon markets mature, as regulatory requirements tighten, and as stakeholder expectations continue to rise, sustainability will become an increasingly non-negotiable dimension of every procurement process — not just those explicitly focused on environmental projects.
The organizations that build sustainability into their procurement DNA now will be better positioned to comply with future regulations, attract and retain purpose-driven talent, manage supply chain risk, and build lasting relationships with vendors who share their values.
For procurement professionals, the question is no longer whether to take sustainability seriously in your RFP processes. The question is how quickly you can build the competency, the tools, and the internal alignment to do it well.
Starting with a well-structured, thoughtfully designed RFP is one of the most impactful steps you can take. Tools like CreateYourRFP can help you get there faster, providing a professional, customizable foundation that you can adapt to your organization's specific sustainability priorities. But the real work — defining your values, aligning your stakeholders, and holding vendors accountable — is work that only you can do.
Watershed has shown that rigorous, science-based, sustainability-first procurement is not just possible. It's scalable, credible, and increasingly expected. The rest of the procurement world is watching — and following.