Mr Benedict Chia, director-general of climate change at the National Climate Change Secretariat, wants to enhance transparency through CAD trust.
“Within 12 months, we managed to onboard six registries and the six registries represent 85 per cent of carbon credits issued to date,” Mr Chia said. Discussions are ongoing with Gold Standard in Geneva, and three United States-based groups: the American Carbon Registry, Architecture for REDD+ Transactions and Climate Action Reserve.
Emitters can meet their climate change targets, such as the goal to taper planet-warming emissions to net-zero by the middle of the century, by buying credits from carbon projects around the world and counting the emission savings from those projects as their own. The dashboard allows users to track carbon offsets generated by more than 17,300 projects approved by the six registries.
But the US$2 billion carbon market has been overshadowed in recent years by criticism about poor-quality offsets from projects that failed to achieve the emissions reductions as planned, double-counting, and limited co-benefits, such as excluding local communities from a protected forest or monoculture forest plantations having no beneficial biodiversity outcome.
Countries can either purchase these credits from another country via a bilateral agreement, or buy them from a new carbon credit market administered by the UN. The mechanisms for this UN market are still being negotiated, but could be finalised in the next year or two.