Stephen Donofrio: It’s been busy! After announcing last month that the voluntary carbon markets are on track to hit $1 billion for the first time in a calendar year in 2021, the Ecosystem Marketplace team has been greatly encouraged with incredible interest in our data and insights.
In general, there seems to be conclusive awareness that in order to achieve the infamous 1.5 degree C Paris Agreement goal, companies and governments to invest in all types of carbon credit projects.
In response to this, we’ve officially activated our daily-capable on-demand online trade reporting for carbon credit sellers to update their Ecosystem Marketplace Global Carbon Survey profiles as trades occur.
We’re really excited to be able to offer our EM Respondents first access to the more advanced data filters and tools to create customized views of trades prices and volumes, as well as meta-registry issuances and retirements.
In 2019 in Madrid, negotiations got a long way toward designing a pretty solid and transparent system under Article 6.
These issues, by the way, come into play only with a centralized system for emissions trading, i.e., a global carbon market.
Carbon market mechanisms help you seek out lower cost solutions.
Second, you create a demand signal that will pull in more private investment into mitigation projects, with huge potential implications for sustainable development.
But also there’s a sense that it needs to be the right agreement or you create all these loopholes that undermine the whole Paris effort.
For me, honestly a little unexpected too – that despite these delays, despite the global pandemic, that so many companies and cities and universities have grabbed the baton and kept moving forward on their own plans for action.
Companies have set ambitious net zero targets, and a lot of them are using carbon credits to tackle that last five percent or so of emissions that are really tricky to address.
Personally, I think that’s a very good thing.