OSLO - New UN guidelines for carbon trading, set at November's COP26 climate talks, are a step toward enlisting forests to help curb global warming, but robust rules are urgently needed for a fast-growing yet opaque voluntary corporate market, analysts say.
"There is a screaming need to have more regulation and rules around this," said Anders Haug Larsen, head of policy at Rainforest Foundation Norway, which supports indigenous rights. Voluntary carbon markets are on track to exceed US$1 billion in trades for the first time in 2021, according to an annual report from Forest Trends' Ecosystem Marketplace.
Breakthroughs in Glasgow included setting accounting rules, championed by developed nations, which prevent double-counting of emissions cuts when two nations co-operate on reductions under their climate action plans, known as Nationally Determined Contributions . "There's no stick we can wave - the market must want this to happen," he told an online briefing this month.Under the rules set in Glasgow to prevent double-counting by governments, the United States could pay to plant forests in Brazil to soak up 100 million tonnes of carbon emissions, and it would be recorded as a cut in US emissions - not Brazil's.