It might still be years before countries can offset their emissions with credits based on greenhouse gas-reducing projects elsewhere, under an international carbon market first called for in Article 6 of the"After years of negotiations about whether carbon markets under the Paris Agreement would actually exist, now they are at the stage of actually setting them up," said Jonathan Crook, policy analyst at the non-profit Carbon Market Watch.
Pedro Barata, carbon markets specialist at the Environmental Defense Fund, said that while he was impressed by the size of the draft document, he said it was clear that "this is not leading up to a decision here that would clear away all of this." Wednesday's draft document only referred to the subsection of Article 6 that deals with how countries can use the carbon market.