The inclusion of flawed carbon credits in any compliance or voluntary market – particularly within the EU’s 2040 climate architecture – would pose a serious risk to environmental integrity. If the EU allows these credits to count towards its legally binding climate targets, it will effectively undermine real domestic mitigation by replacing it with credits that exist only on paper.
Apparently, EU lawmakers are exploring four potential loopholes to weaken the target under the guise of “greater flexibility”. Under consideration are suggestions that include postponing climate action until the latter half of the 2030’s, allowing for more flexibility between EU sectors, or relying on international offsets and additional carbon removals to somehow fill the gap caused by EU inaction.
The decision by the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM) to withhold its stamp of approval from the most problematic cookstove methodologies and to approve a good methodology is a welcome step in the right direction but more needs to be done.
At the COP29 climate conference in Baku, negotiators need to fix Article 6 carbon markets but, most importantly, they need to fix the world’s failure to slash emissions.
The latest round of UN climate negotiations in Bonn has laid the groundwork for the power players to finally agree at COP29 on transparency and wider quality issues of Article 6 carbon markets. Our CMW team reports.
Our latest report discusses how carbon credits from renewable energy projects are in oversupply and fail to deliver additional climate benefits
Carbon Market Watch has prepared a set of recommendations for Article 6 negotiators ahead of the UNFCCC climate change conference taking place in Bonn from 3-13 June 2024 (SB 60).
The body responsible for supervising the new UN carbon market mechanism must abandon the inadequate rules for social and environmental safeguards and return to the drawing board.
To illustrate the differences between the Article 6.4 grievance process and the UN Green Climate Fund’s Independent Redress Mechanism, we compared these two avenues for remediation with the UN Human Rights Council’s seven effectiveness criteria for grievance mechanisms as outlined in its Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. From this overview, the contrast becomes clear: the Article 6.4 grievance process performs significantly less well on all seven effectiveness criteria. The Article 6.4 Supervisory Body must therefore urgently rethink its approach to this crucial component of the 6.4 mechanism.
Motivated by a desire to keep down the cost of achieving its climate targets, the EU has failed to rule out the double counting of emissions reductions under its Carbon Removals Certification Framework. By so doing it is undermining established standards and its own policies.
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