The annual climate change conference (COP29) began with the approval of the rules for the international carbon market, after a long and tense negotiating session to approve the summit agenda.
The establishment of international carbon markets should make it easier for nations to meet their climate goals by trading greenhouse gas emissions credits.
The provisions, awaiting approval since the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, were adopted by consensus by the nearly 200 countries participating in the agreement. COP29 in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan.
One credit is equivalent to one ton of carbon dioxide prevented from entering or removed from the atmosphere.
The adopted criteria regulate the methodology for calculating the number of credits that a given project can generate, as well as what happens if the stored carbon is lost, for example, if the forest that served as a backup burns down.
The new rules primarily concern countries — especially rich polluters — that seek to offset their emissions by buying credits from nations that have reduced greenhouse gases beyond what they had promised.
The adopted criteria regulate the methodology for calculating the number of credits that a given project can generate, as well as what happens if the stored carbon is lost, for example if the forest that served as backup burns down.
Local impact
Asked about the impact that the approval of the rules on the carbon marketsAlan Ramírez, representative of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and country facilitator of the NDC Partnership, recalled that the country’s climate commitments “involve a significant financial investment. The carbon markets “they can and should contribute to climate finance.”
He added that the approved rule book “will allow or facilitate the development of the carbon marketsthrough a new mechanism, called Sustainable Development Markets”.
Months of negotiations
The COP29 must demonstrate that global cooperation “is not at a standstill”, requested the head of the UN Climate Agency, Simon Stiell.
The Baku summit has been informally called the “COP of financing”, because it must deal with the essential issue of the aid that the countries that contribute the most to the problem should provide to the most affected nations.
For months the nearly 200 countries in the Paris Agreement have negotiated a draft agreement to set a new amount of aid.
In 2009, at COP15 in Copenhagen, it was agreed that industrialized countries would provide 100 billion dollars annually, in direct aid or multilateral loans.
That amount of aid was reached two years late, in 2022, and now experts say that at least ten times as much is needed.
This aid must serve both to mitigate the emission of greenhouse gases, particularly through a gigantic global energy conversion, and in adaptation, that is, the construction of dams, the adaptation of homes to extreme temperatures.
