Friday, July 20, 2007

State of the Voluntary Carbon Markets 2007

From the Katoomba Group and New Carbon Finance:

The results show that, like the early stages of the regulated carbon markets of the European Union’s Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) and the Kyoto Protocol, the voluntary markets are evolving rapidly. They also show that 2006 was a year of significant growth with many new retailers, brokers, and other actors entering the market.

Since 2002 the number of organizations supplying carbon credits into the market has grown by 200%, with online retailers being the fastest growing sector of the marketplace. Between 2005 and 2006 the Over the Counter (OTC) voluntary offset market grew 200%. In 2006 23.7 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (MtCO2e) were transacted in the voluntary carbon markets.

Of this, 10.3 MtCO2e were transacted on the Chicago Climate Exchange, and our survey revealed that some 13.4 MtCO2e were transacted in the OTC market.

Because it is impossible to capture all OTC transactions in a survey such as this, the actual volume traded may be considerably larger than this amount.While these numbers are small relative to volumes of transacted in the regulated carbon markets like the EU ETS, the combined voluntary markets (CCX+OTC) are larger in volume than both the Kyoto Protocol’s Joint Implementation mechanism and the New South Wales Greenhouse Gas Abatement Scheme.

59 page PDF
HT: Environmental Finance