What Is Our Guiding Motivation?

We want to see a properly functioning carbon credit market: one in which the purchaser knows that they have a valuable asset which represents additional carbon capture/avoidance; and equally one where the producers of credits are rewarded with enhanced pricing where the provenance of the credit is provable; proven; lawful and beneficial to its locality.

The value of credits can be vitiated by a number of factors: outright fraud by the producers; inadequate supervision in certification; the use of overstated calculations of carbon removal; a failure by the producer to follow through their future actions as promised. These issues lead to a depressed market value for the credits and a vicious spiral exists: there is little incentive to producers to get it right; there is little value placed in them by the market and governments and blue chip purchasers (both in the voluntary and compulsory markets) lose faith in their efficacy

And yet, as governments increasingly realise that reaching anywhere close to absolute zero carbon emissions will be impossibly expensive, the integral role of carbon offset in achieving nett zero becomes ever more self-evident. With that realisation comes a concomitant need to improve their quality and hence the market's confidence in them.

Top-down duties such as those placed on nation states in Article 6.4 of the Paris Agreement will not swiftly provide solutions. What is needed are bottom-up solutions providing market based mechanisms for improving behaviours in and around carbon accounting generally, carbon offset production, sale, certification and discharge. This is where Climate Law can help. Having assisted one of the largest producers of tropical timber in West Africa for a number of years (Mere Plantations Ltd, a UK registered company) in its regulatory duties, it is well placed to do so more generally