Isa Mulder is a policy expert on global carbon markets at Carbon Market Watch.
In recent months, industry players as well as some conservation groups have been pushing to effectively lower the integrity and ambition of carbon markets under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement.
However, the need to finance nature does not excuse creating a carbon crediting mechanism devoid of environmental integrity, just to keep carbon projects commercially viable. The bar set by the Article 6 crediting mechanism must be high, as the price that nature will pay if we opt to rely on hot air credits to offset ongoing emissions is much higher.
Carbon credit markets have been a controversial feature of international climate politics since the establishment of the Clean Development Mechanism under the Kyoto Protocol, and later adoption under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement.
Although the Article 6 rulebook was finalised at last year’s COP in Baku – albeit with many worrisome gaps – the nitty-gritty of its carbon crediting mechanism is still being developed. That work is overseen by the Supervisory Body (SBM), a de facto regulator accountable to the signatory countries of the Paris Agreement.
Permanence rules weakened
Between July and September 2025, the Methodological Expert Panel (MEP) – the technical advisory committee reporting back to the SBM – produced draft rules on permanence, intended to spell out the steps that carbon market projects must take to guarantee their emission reductions or removals are permanently and securely stored on climate-relevant timeframes (centuries to millennia).
The MEP’s final recommendation introduced requirements for carbon projects considered at risk of losing their achieved results. This included requiring projects to monitor their claimed mitigation until it could be reliably demonstrated that the likelihood of re-releasing sequestered CO₂ (e.g., carbon stored in trees) into the atmosphere was negligible, such as through events like fire or logging. In essence, high-risk projects would need to keep a watchful eye on emission reductions or removals for as long as that risk remains significant.
The rationale behind this is that carbon credits are often used for offsetting purposes as a means to supposedly compensate for ongoing fossil fuel emissions, of which the negative impacts are nearly permanent.
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It is therefore reasonable to expect that the carbon credits designed to compensate for this damage also guarantee positive impacts over a comparable duration. Failing to do so would mean that any apparent short-term benefits of offsetting would eventually become harmful and lead to net temperature increases, even before considering the broader environmental and social concerns related to offsetting.
However, this seemingly sound rationale rubbed many market actors the wrong way.
Whereas such documents typically attract only a handful of stakeholder responses, this one received over 170 reactions during the first and second rounds of consultations on the proposed rules.
Carbon Market Watch found that in the second round, three-quarters of commenters held direct or indirect financial interests in carbon markets and most of them strongly opposed the draft requirements. Their efforts were successful, and, as a result, weaker rules were adopted.
Carbon credits cannot save nature alone
Now turning their attention to COP30, many of the same market actors, along with some conservation organisations, are asking countries to further erode the integrity of the carbon crediting mechanism under Article 6.
Efforts to dilute these rules further risk derailing Article 6 at COP30, a conference which is meant to place nature front and centre. The misconception at the heart of this dangerous campaign is that stronger rules would negatively affect nature-based projects.
While it is undeniable that financing nature is essential for reaching our Paris Agreement goals, the need to finance nature is no good reason to create a carbon crediting mechanism lacking in environmental rigour, motivated by market actors’ desire to keep carbon projects commercially viable.
Is “hard-to-abate” really that hard – or is it a justification for delay?
Those in favour of weakening the rules often seem to conveniently overlook that most credits approved and circulating have been of very low quality and that they are used – mainly by big oil – to excuse business-as-usual emissions.
The scientific consensus holds that finance for nature must be scaled up to protect the natural world, but not by linking it to the offsetting of fossil emissions, whose climate impacts last for millennia. In fact, scientists have warned time and again about the serious shortcomings of relying on offsetting as a climate solution. If the credits used to compensate for fossil fuel emissions can’t make good on their promise, then climate change will worsen, and nature will end up being worse off.
The choice ahead of us is clear. Countries at COP30 will have to make a decision on the direction of travel for this discussion. The question is not how to bend carbon market rules to create a financing mechanism for nature-based offsetting projects, but how to uphold and strengthen those rules to protect nature itself.
The post Carbon market supporters risk cheating the nature they wish to protect appeared first on Climate Home News.
Carbon market supporters risk cheating the nature they wish to protect
Next week, diplomats from around the world will descend on Yerevan, Armenia, to negotiate a series of decisions under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
Between 19 and 30 October, 196 parties will gather to hammer out the precise wording of the dozens of legal texts that make up the decisions under the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the CBD.
This year’s summit is particularly significant, as it marks the halfway point between the agreement of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the deadline for achieving its targets.
The CBD has found that countries are currently not on track to meet 22 out of the framework’s 23 targets.
During the fortnight, delegates will also be negotiating decisions relating to the two supplemental protocols to the CBD: the Cartagena Protocol, which covers biosafety; and the Nagoya Protocol, which covers access and benefit-sharing for the use of genetic resources.
(The Cartagena and Nagoya Protocols, which are each governed by a “meeting of the parties”, or “MOP”, have fewer parties than the CBD as a whole, with 173 and 141, respectively.)
Carbon Brief is tracking the progress of countries towards consensus on dozens of negotiating texts using the interactive table below.
The tracker includes texts from the COP, as well as the MOPs for the Cartagena and Nagoya protocols. It also includes draft decisions from the most recent subsidiary body meetings, as these form the starting point for the negotiations in Yerevan.
The CBD has three subsidiary bodies: the subsidiary body on scientific, technical and technological advice (SBSTTA), the subsidiary body on implementation (SBI) and the subsidiary body on article 8(j) and other provisions (SB8J).
SB8J focuses on issues related to the Indigenous peoples and local communities. It was established at COP16 in Cali, Colombia, in 2024.
The first two columns of the interactive tracker list the topic of each agenda item and the relevant body, with subsequent columns including dates, page counts and links to the original documents.
The table is searchable and can be sorted using the arrows in the header.
Areas of disagreement in UN draft texts are denoted by square brackets. Counting the brackets in a particular iteration of a text therefore gives a sense of how far parties are from reaching consensus.
The bracket column is colour-coded, with dark green indicating a low number of brackets and red indicating a high number of brackets remaining.
Texts can also present parties with choices using “options” or alternatives (“alt”), which are counted together in the sixth column of the table.
The key discussions in Yerevan will centre around two agenda items in particular. The first is the global review, which will assess progress towards the GBF and make recommendations for accelerating action.
The second is finance, which can be separated into two parts: resource mobilisation and the financial mechanism. On resource mobilisation, biodiverse global south countries are likely to push for an increased amount of international finance for conservation.
Disagreement over the creation of the financial mechanism led to the suspension of COP16 in Cali in October 2024, as parties failed to find agreement on the mobilisation of finance before the end of the summit.
Global south countries want the establishment of a separate financial mechanism under the control of the CBD; global north countries largely prefer to maintain the existing mechanism, which sits under the Global Environment Facility.
At the resumed session of COP16 in Rome in early 2025, countries agreed on a roadmap that would lead to the establishment of a permanent mechanism.
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The post Interactive: Tracking negotiating texts at the COP17 biodiversity summit appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Interactive: Tracking negotiating texts at the COP17 biodiversity summit
A beacon of love
On an outer island of Fiji, two thousand nautical miles from Sydney, is a shining light of hope and resilience for our troubled world.
The island of Kioa is home to a Tuvaluan community who migrated from their atoll of Vaitupu in the late 1940s. It is a land of warm hearts, big smiles, and deep cultural roots; a place where the sound of a conch still summons the island together, where islanders paddle out to fish in carved outrigger canoes, and healthy happy children walk barefoot to school.
Here, culture is life. Kioans live sustainably through their traditional knowledge and practices. The island is alive with song, dance and the rhythms of a life tied to the tides, the winds, and the seasons.
Facing the future
Greenpeace has been lucky to have a relationship with Kioa for a number of years now, and we are continually learning from this remarkable community.
Last week, as part of our Voyaging Oceania project, we returned to the island. Our purpose was twofold —- to carry messages from the island to leaders gathering in Nadi this week for the Pacific Pre-COP, and to support the Kioa community in their efforts to improve water security for the island.
Unlike Tuvalu itself, with its eight atolls, Kioa is a mountainous, forested and richly fertile island. It will remain habitable far into the future. Kioans did not initially migrate from Vaitupu due to climate change, but the move was prophetic. They now have a lifeboat.
However, even Kioa faces challenges on our rapidly warming planet, in particular when it comes to water. Climate change is shifting once reliable rainfall patterns. On top of this, the island is already feeling the effect of this year’s intensifying El Niño event, which for Fiji means reduced rainfall and prolonged dry spells.
Right now, fresh water has to be carefully rationed, and is only available for a few hours a day. During last week’s visit aboard our campaigning ship Oceania, Greenpeace was privileged to work with the Kioa community on a new solar-powered water distribution project for the island.
Designed and led by the island, the project involves using a solar pump to move water from a reliable source to a storage tank and then using gravity to distribute the water around the village.
It was a lesson in how local knowledge and ingenuity can be the backbone of today’s climate solutions. To build a dam around the source, the local community knew the exact spot where they could gather gravel at low tide to mix with the cement. They took only what was needed, knowing that all resources must be carefully conserved. Kioa has no roads and no machinery, and it was an all-of-island effort to carry the materials up to the project site, including many heavy bags of sand and rock.
Such projects truly bring to life the vision of a resilient, locally-led, fossil fuel free Pacific.