Martin Hession is Chair of the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body, which oversees the rules for the UN carbon market under the Paris Agreement, and Maria AlJishi is the body’s Vice Chair.
The recent adoption of new standards for the UN’s carbon market marks a key step for international climate cooperation, finally aligning offset crediting with the Paris Agreement and providing a benchmark for countries and investors in a world where all nations are expected to continuously raise their climate ambition.
As Chair and Vice-Chair of the Supervisory Body developing these rules, we are acutely aware that we serve a diverse set of actors. Our task is to steer a path that delivers climate ambition, supports country priorities, safeguards social and environmental integrity, and offers a reliable framework for investment.
At the core is a persistent question: are the rules effective in delivering real results and fair in balancing the interests of all those involved in the market?
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In the past two years, we’ve made important progress. We’ve adopted broad standards for how to calculate both emission reductions and emissions removals, established a system to manage the risk of emissions reversals, and introduced mandatory environmental and human rights safeguards and an independent grievance and appeals process. However, without a steady flow of investment, this progress will remain largely on paper.
Laying the foundation for greater ambition
With the adoption of the new baseline standard in May, we’ve entered a new phase, enabling more ambitious credits. We now have a clear and rigorous standard to guide the implementation of stronger crediting benchmarks. In today’s context, it offers a more realistic starting point for measuring credible emissions reductions and removals.
Under this benchmark, credits can only be claimed for reductions compared to conservative estimates of what would have occurred without the project. Projects can no longer earn credits for minor improvements over business-as-usual; they must use more conservative baselines that reflect growing climate ambition.
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For example, a mechanism methodology may require crediting levels to be set at least 10% below historical emissions or benchmarked against best-in-class performance and then require a decline by at least 1% per year. This steady tightening ensures alignment with a net zero pathway, reduces the risk of over-crediting, and helps host countries retain more emission reductions, supporting future ambition.
The leakage standard is another important step, though more work remains to address emissions impacts at the national or sectoral level. Its goal is to make sure that projects reducing emissions in one place don’t cause emissions elsewhere. For example, if a reforestation project protects one area but displaces logging to a nearby region, the overall benefit could be lost. The standard requires projects to identify and track such indirect impacts and subtract them from the emissions cuts they claim.
Avoiding past mistakes
These technical standards are essential to ensuring environmental integrity. But their success also depends on trust and participation, particularly from countries hosting the carbon credit projects. As they weigh whether to approve credits and crediting programmes, they will understandably want to retain a share of the emissions reduction benefits from the investments. The new standards help address this, but more is needed.
The Paris Agreement Crediting Mechanism (PACM) already hardwires the roles and responsibilities of host countries into its processes. At our last meeting, we discussed how to strengthen communication and deepen engagement with host countries to ensure national policies and climate ambition are respected, and where requested, supported and enhanced.
Carbon credits have long faced scrutiny for overpromising and underdelivering. We are well aware of the need to avoid repeating past mistakes. From the outset, we’ve worked to improve on previous models, applying lessons learned.
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The context for crediting has changed significantly since the early days of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), a benchmark for many voluntary programmes. While we will continue to build on CDM methodologies and experience, we must adapt them to a more ambitious framework, one that responds to host country expectations the CDM was never designed to meet.
We now move forward with renewed confidence. Our new rules allow for top-down updates to old carbon credit methodologies – meaning we can revise them centrally for key sectors. We’ve also received the first proposal for a brand-new methodology through the bottom-up process, where ideas come directly from project developers or local actors. And the first PACM credits could be issued later this year.
Scrutiny welcome
We’ve been criticised for moving slowly and for the complexity of our process. It has taken time to reach political agreement on the implementation framework for the new UN carbon market. But the positive reception of the framework we presented at the COP29 climate summit in Baku helped accelerate our progress. Thanks to the excellent work of our expert panels, we adopted detailed standards quickly. We believe these are both ambitious and clear.
Of course, there is more to do. Later this year, we’ll consider detailed rules to assess and insure against the risk of emissions reversals. We aim to see the full framework in action by early next year.
We are taking a practical, agile approach to implementation. The general standards set the direction; individual methodologies will be detailed but designed to evolve. Implementation will be phased, with space for continuous feedback and improvement.
We welcome scrutiny, not just for accountability, but as essential to our mission of fair and effective implementation for a high-integrity UN carbon market.
The post A credible UN carbon market needs rules that count – we’ve just set them appeared first on Climate Home News.
A credible UN carbon market needs rules that count – we’ve just set them
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The clean energy sector is showing resilience despite challenges thrown at it by a hostile White House, a recent report found. A string of legal victories has further dampened the Trump administration’s efforts to halt wind and solar power.
The Trump administration has abandoned its effort to halt wind energy projects across the United States and dropped its challenge to the court ruling that tossed President Donald Trump’s order freezing federal permitting and leasing for wind projects. States that challenged the order hailed the development as one of the most significant legal victories against the Trump White House’s campaign against the energy transition.
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Amid reports that the government could weaken the UK’s electric vehicle (EV) targets, Carbon Brief analysis reveals the nation’s EV drivers are saving more than £1,100 a year in fuel costs, compared with running a petrol car.
Battery EVs (BEVs) are roughly four times more efficient than combustion-engine cars, making them far cheaper to run – particularly since the Iran crisis caused a spike in fossil-fuel prices.
The savings from driving BEVs are also more than three times higher than for “plug-in” hybrids (PHEVs), which evidence shows are mostly driven with their combustion engines.
In total, the more than 2m BEVs, 1m PHEVs and 100,000 electric vans on UK roads are saving drivers around £3bn a year, Carbon Brief’s analysis shows, as illustrated in the figure below.
In addition, these EVs are avoiding the need for nearly 2.5bn litres of fuel and cutting carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by nearly 7m tonnes each year.
Despite recent news that EVs are now cheaper to buy than petrol cars, as well as having far lower running costs, BBC News says the government is “set to water down” its EV sales targets.
The broadcaster explains that the current goal, under the UK’s “zero-emissions vehicle” (ZEV) mandate, is for 80% of new car sales to be BEVs by 2030.
It says that the government is set to consult on weakening this to between 50% and 70%, following “lobbying” by carmakers and trade unions.
According to the Sunday Times, prime minister Keir Starmer “is understood to have overruled the energy secretary [Ed Miliband] after sustained pressure from industry, the Unite union and Peter Kyle, the business secretary”.
The car industry has consistently claimed there is insufficient demand for BEVs to meet the targets under the ZEV mandate, yet the government says manufacturers have “over-complied” to date. Independent analysts say the industry is on track to continue beating the ZEV mandate goals.
The industry has been able to beat its targets by using a wide range of “flexibilities”, which were introduced after a previous round of lobbying. These allow carmarkers to meet part of their EV targets by selling more efficient combustion cars, such as hybrids and plug-in hybrids.
The ZEV mandate is the single-largest part of the government’s plans to meet its legally binding climate goals over the next decade.
The advisory Climate Change Committee (CCC) previously warned that the extra flexibilities would result in a larger number of hybrids being sold, at the expense of battery EVs.
When it consulted on the ZEV mandate in 2023, the then-Conservative government noted that PHEVs do not deliver the cost and CO2 savings they are advertised with.
It pointed to “dramatic” differences between the performance of PHEVs in test cycles and what they deliver under real-world conditions.
In practice, less than a third of miles driven in PHEVs are fuelled by electricity, with petrol making up the rest. As a result, cost and CO2 savings from BEVs are three times larger than for PHEVs.
The post Analysis: UK’s EV drivers are now saving £1,100 each a year – and £3bn in total appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: UK’s EV drivers are now saving £1,100 each a year – and £3bn in total
Civil society groups have called for an investigation into the first carbon credits approved under a new UN mechanism, alleging the project is linked to Myanmar’s military junta – which the UN says is guilty of human rights abuses – and has “massively” overstated its climate impact.
The programme, which aims to cut emissions by distributing efficient cookstoves across Myanmar, received approval to issue around 650,000 carbon credits from the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body in February, in a landmark moment for the Paris Agreement’s carbon market. Only two projects have been given the green light by the mechanism’s regulator so far.
But two reports published last week, led by the Global Forest Coalition and Brussels-based NGO Carbon Market Watch, raised serious concerns about the project’s implementation in conflict zones where civilians have faced airstrikes and mass displacement as well as its emission-reduction calculations.
Project continued after military coup
Myanmar has been ravaged by a brutal civil war since the country’s military overthrew the democratically elected government in a coup d’état in February 2021. The military regime has attacked civilian populations, persecuted ethnic minorities and committed widespread sexual violence, among other serious human rights violations, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar said in April.
The cookstove programme started in 2018 under the previous UN-run carbon offsetting scheme – the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) – as a partnership between Myanmar’s Ministry of Natural Resources and Environmental Conservation (MONREC) and the Climate Change Center (CCC), a South Korean NGO, with investment from private South Korean firms.
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The project continued operating after the coup. For most of the period between 2021 and 2022 in which the issued credits were generated, MONREC was led by Colonel Khin Maung Yi, who was sanctioned by the European Union in 2021 for supporting the military regime, the Global Forest Coalition report said.
CCC acknowledged engaging with government authorities after the coup but said this “should not be interpreted as political endorsement” of the junta. The South Korean NGO added that abandoning the programme when political circumstances changed “would not necessarily have been the most responsible outcome for the households involved”.
Conflict prevents on the ground verification
The Global Forest Coalition report raised particular concerns about the project’s implementation in Myanmar’s central Dry Zone, including Sagaing Region, an anti-junta resistance stronghold that has been most heavily affected by the conflict and routinely targeted by airstrikes and violent attacks. The region accounts for more than a third of Myanmar’s 3.8 million internally displaced people.
The NGOs said that, in addition to ethical concerns about carbon credits being produced by the military government in an area actively affected by its attacks, this raises questions over the ability to effectively verify the climate integrity of the projects.
Before carbon credits are issued, external auditors need to validate the claims made by project developers and confirm that the emission reductions claimed are correct. This process usually includes site visits to a representative sample of households to check how the improved cookstoves are being used.
But, because of the “volatile political situation” in Myanmar, the auditing team was not able to leave the capital Yangon and could only speak to project participants remotely via Zoom, project documents show.
“Due to ongoing armed conflict on the ground, the data currently used to justify carbon credit issuance in Sagaing by the Burmese military junta is unverifiable and highly likely fraudulent,” said Zaw Tuseng, founder and president of the Myanmar Policy Institute, which contributed to the report, in a written statement. “This demands an immediate suspension of credit transfers until a neutral, conflict-sensitive audit can be conducted.”
“Exceptional circumstances”
CCC told Climate Home News that, although it recognises that on-site verification is “generally preferable, particularly in complex operating environments”, the decision to opt for remote controls was not taken “as a discretionary shortcut, but as an approved alternative under exceptional circumstances”.
The South Korean NGO added that it reviewed the feasibility of the project at community level “on an ongoing basis” and it “did not identify conflict-related incidents that directly affected project implementation activities in participating communities during the monitoring period”.
A spokesperson for the UN climate change body told Climate Home News that, when site access is not possible, the UN carbon credit mechanism allows for “alternative verification approaches while still maintaining conservative assumptions and environmental integrity safeguards”. “These provisions ensure that crediting can only proceed where evidence is reliable,” they added.
Contested methodology
Carbon markets are seen as an important channel to raise money to help low-income communities in developing countries switch to less polluting cooking methods, both reducing CO2 emissions and improving air quality. But several cookstove offsetting projects have faced criticism from researchers and campaigners who argue that climate benefits are often exaggerated and weak monitoring can undermine claims of real emission reductions.
The project in Myanmar uses a contested methodology developed under the earlier Kyoto Protocol that was rejected last year by The Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM), a watchdog that issues quality labels to carbon credit types, because it found it “insufficiently rigorous”.
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After transitioning from the CDM to the new mechanism, the project was required to apply “more conservative” assumptions to calculate emission reductions, which resulted in 40% fewer credits being issued, according to the UN climate change body.
“The result is consistent with environmental integrity requirements and ensures that each credited tonne genuinely represents a tonne reduced and contributes to the goals of the Paris Agreement,” Mkhuthazi Steleki, the South African chair of the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body, which oversees the mechanism, said in February.
Too many credits issued
But Carbon Market Watch claimed in a second report last week that, despite the adjustment, the project is still likely to issue seven times more credits than its real climate impact justifies, comparing its calculations with values from peer-reviewed scientific literature.
The biggest driver of the credit inflation, the group said, is the failure to account for “stacking” – the widespread practice of households using multiple stoves at the same time, including more polluting ones the project does not monitor.
Peer-reviewed science considers a stacking rate of 68% a conservative assumption, but the methodology used by the Myanmar programme makes no allowance for it at all, the report said.
CCC disputed those findings. In a written response to Climate Home News, it said the project was developed under methodologies approved within the UN climate framework and that external recalculations by researchers are not “determinative of the level of crediting achieved”.
The credits are expected to be used primarily by major South Korean polluters to meet obligations under the country’s emissions trading system – a move that will also enable the government to count those units toward emissions reduction targets in its nationally determined contribution (NDC), the UN climate body told Climate Home News.
Myanmar will use the remaining credits to achieve in part the goals of its own national climate plan under the Paris Agreement.
“Over-crediting, at any magnitude, cannot be compatible with the climate ambition of a world striving to limit global warming to 1.5ºC,” said Isa Mulder, an expert at Carbon Market Watch.
The post UN’s first Paris Agreement carbon credits face human rights and climate concerns appeared first on Climate Home News.
UN’s first Paris Agreement carbon credits face human rights and climate concerns
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