Carbon credits generated from renewable energy projects have failed to obtain a new quality label from a key oversight body, casting fresh doubt on popular emissions offsets favoured by multinational companies like Audi, Shell and Total.
The Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM) announced on Tuesday that eight renewable energy methodologies, which cover about a third of the carbon credits available on the voluntary market, cannot use its “Core Carbon Principles” (CCP) seal of approval.
The ICVCM, an independent watchdog, aims to address widespread concerns over the quality of carbon credits after many projects have been accused of overstating their climate and societal benefits. It is assessing groups of offsetting projects to determine whether they comply with the CCP criteria, which are designed to identify and encourage high-integrity carbon credits that meet requirements on governance, emissions reduction and sustainable development.
The body said existing standards are not strict enough on judging whether renewable energy projects need the funding generated by selling carbon offsets in order to go ahead – a concept known as “additionality”. But it emphasised that renewables like solar, wind and hydropower are key to tackling climate change and carbon credits “still have a role to play” in financing them.
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Since the eight methodologies were designed as long as 20 years ago, the cost of renewables has collapsed, and their profitability in many parts of the world has rocketed, meaning they are more likely to make money without needing extra revenue from selling carbon offsets.
The ICVCM said that “for several years, carbon market experts have noted concerns about the additionality of many renewable energy activities and the difficulties in transparently demonstrating the additionality of these activities approved under existing methodologies”.
Major carbon-credit registries like Verra and Gold Standard stopped accepting new grid-connected projects in 2019, with the exception of those located in least-developed countries (LDCs).
But pre-existing renewable energy activities continue to generate a sizeable chunk of all the offsets available on the registries.
According to a recent analysis by Carbon Market Watch, over 280 million renewable energy credits are available in the voluntary carbon market. If companies and individuals used all those credits, that would compensate on paper for emissions equivalent to the amount of carbon dioxide Thailand released into the atmosphere last year.
Inigo Wyburd, a policy expert at Carbon Market Watch, called the ICVCM’s decision “a positive step”. “It sends a clear message to tackle the issue of the many low-quality credits still in circulation and undermining the market,” he told Climate Home.
Despite long being written off as largely worthless by climate experts, renewable energy credits are still popular among corporate buyers.
Fossil fuel majors like Shell and Total, automakers and cruise operators were among the biggest purchasers of renewable energy credits over the last 12 months, an analysis of Verra’s database shows.
In one transaction last year, German carmaker Audi used nearly 100,000 carbon credits generated in 2021 from an Indian solar project to claim that its handover of electric vehicles in Europe and the United States was “CO2 neutral” despite the emissions involved in producing them.
Japanese parcel delivery service Yamato Transport Company and public entities like Australia’s Brisbane City Council and Western Sydney University also relied on renewable offsets to claim carbon neutrality in 2023.
Because of earlier concerns about whether carbon offsets generated by renewable energy deliver the emissions reductions they claim, their price has been falling over the last two years.
According to data provider MSCI, the average price is just $2 per tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent reduced – less than half the price of offsets derived from projects aiming to protect forests, tackle methane emissions or promote energy efficiency. Renewable energy credits are likely to see further falls in price after the ICVCM’s rejection.
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But Amy Merrill, CEO of the ICVCM, left the door open to better renewables methodologies obtaining CCP approval. She called on carbon crediting programmes to develop methodologies “that better reflect the rapidly changing and variable circumstances around renewable energy deployment”.
“While renewable energy costs have fallen dramatically around the globe over the past decade,” she said, “they have not fallen evenly across all countries and high up-front expenses and other barriers mean that there are still many places where it is difficult to deploy renewable capacity.”
The cost of renewables is particularly high in remote rural parts of developing countries without access to the electricity grid, on islands with small populations and in areas where the authorities are hostile to renewable energy for ideological reasons, particularly in parts of the US. Methodologies enabling projects in these places would have the best case to get CCP approval, market experts told Climate Home.
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Verra has announced that it will revise some of its additionality requirements “to address the deficiencies noted by the ICVCM”.
The registry plans to submit its new rulebook to the watchdog and give existing projects the possibility of updating their quantification of credits accordingly. “This is part of our commitment to providing a path for all VCS [voluntary carbon standard] projects that wish pursue a path to CCP labelling,” Verra said in a statement.
A Gold Standard spokesperson said ICVCM’s rejection of the methodologies was “ambiguous and potentially harmful to high-quality renewable energy carbon credits on the market today” as different regions across the world still face various financial and technical barriers making carbon finance necessary.
They added that Gold Standard would consider the ICVCM assessment framework among other inputs in its next review of relevant methodologies.
The ICVCM’s negative assessment of existing renewable energy credits could also have repercussions for the new United Nations carbon mechanism currently under development.
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Renewable energy projects make up four-fifths of all projects seeking a transfer from the old Kyoto-era Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) into the new market system being set up under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, Climate Home revealed last January.
The projects need formal authorisation to proceed from the countries where their activities are located.
Carbon Market Watch’s Wyburd said ICVCM’s rejection of the renewable energy methodologies “will hopefully send a few shock waves” to the countries having to make those decisions. “Given their profound shortcomings, these credits should not be given a new lease of life under the future UN mechanism,” he added.
At the same time, the ICVCM approved other methodologies to capture methane from landfills and to detect and repair methane leaks in the gas industry. That means 3.6% of unretired carbon credits have now been approved to use the CCP label.
Audi, Shell, Norwegian Cruise Lines, Western Sydney University and Aviva did not respond to a request for comment on the impact of the ICVCM’s renewables decision. Total declined to comment.
(Reporting by Joe Lo and Matteo Civillini, editing by Megan Rowling)
The post Renewable-energy carbon credits rejected by high-integrity scheme appeared first on Climate Home News.
Renewable-energy carbon credits rejected by high-integrity scheme
In the shadow of Ankara’s new international football stadium, a group of visiting journalists – including Climate Home News – perched on tiny chairs watched over by mannequins dressed in old mobile phones, newspapers and bottle tops.
As they sipped Turkish tea in a room meant to educate visitors – mostly schoolchildren – about recycling, they were addressed by Ekrem Yıldırım, lead on zero waste at Türkiye’s environment ministry.
After Yıldırım spoke of Türkiye’s plans to pursue “zero waste”, one journalist asked why the sugar cubes for the tea were individually wrapped in plastic and why water had been served in single-use plastic pots.
Yıldırım accepted that this kind of packaging is a problem and glass or porcelain is preferable. He added that legislation to ban single-use packaging has been introduced to parliament, but is not yet finalised.
The situation symbolised what Turkish experts and environmental campaigners flag as a contradiction between the “zero waste” image that the government – represented by First Lady Emine Erdoğan – presents to the world and the reality of rising Turkish waste generation, significant climate-wrecking methane emissions from landfills and a politically influential industry producing plastics from oil and gas.
International campaign lacks domestic punch
Türkiye’s Zero Waste initiative – which is a vague plan to reduce waste generation and increase recycling, rather than a specific goal to reach zero waste by any specific date – was launched in 2017.
It came at a time when the Turkish government was under fire for its coal mines, its refusal to ratify the Paris Agreement and its brutal response to protests against plans to turn Gezi Park in Istanbul into a barracks and shopping mall.
Ümit Şahin, climate lead at Sabancı University’s Istanbul Policy Center, said the Turkish government saw then, and still sees, the initiative as “a way to build its international reputation on environmental issues”.
“Recycling gives the government something visible to point to,” he said. “It can promote the campaign without taking on powerful fossil fuel interests or changing its development priorities in mining and energy.”
The campaign has been led by Emine Erdoğan, the wife of Türkiye’s long-time president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. In 2022, she convinced countries at the UN General Assembly to create an annual International Day of Zero Waste on March 30.
COP31 President Murat Kurum has picked up on the theme, saying that zero waste is “one of the main pillars” of Türkiye’s COP31 presidency. In September, he reminisced at a press briefing in the northern city of Trabzon about old-fashioned Turkish rural life where food waste would be given to animals, ripped clothes would be mended, and new attire was only for religious festivals.
President Erdoğan told leaders at September’s UN General Assembly in New York that an “incredible desire for consumption” was fuelling a “culture of waste”. “We cannot speak of justice in a world where tonnes of food are thrown into the garbage on one side while hundreds of millions of people collect food from garbage containers on the other,” he railed.
Sedat Gündoğdu, a marine biologist and environmental researcher at Türkiye’s Çukurova University, told Climate Home News that zero waste is a worthy concept. But when it comes to putting words into action at home, he said, the government has failed. Official statistics show the amount of waste each person in Türkiye generates has remained broadly unchanged since 2010 and the total annual amount has increased by 15%.
Single-use plastics ban
To help fix this, an European Union-style ban on single-use plastics – like plastic cutlery, cups and stirrers – was reported by state media in March to be working its way through parliament and expected to come into effect on September 1.
But PAGEV, a Turkish plastics industry trade association, argued that such “restrictive” policies had failed in the EU and would damage the Turkish economy and take away jobs.
Despite COP31 shining an international spotlight on the Turkish waste sector, the ban has yet to be approved by President Erdoğan. Gündoğdu and Greenpeace Türkiye campaigner Berk Butan fear that, if it is approved, it will be watered down so that Turkish companies can make single-use plastics in Türkiye even if they can no longer sell them in the country.
The latter restriction, Gündoğdu argued, would be “meaningless” because it cannot be enforced. Similar measures in Germany and Italy have failed, he said, because manufacturers just relabelled single-use products like plastic straws as multiple-use straws.
To close these loopholes, he said, strict definitions and design criteria are needed, which the Turkish legislation does not have. Butan added that single-use plastics could still be made in Türkiye, and then exported, used and dumped abroad, causing the same environmental damage somewhere else.
Türkiye’s other flagship waste prevention measure is a tax on plastic bags, which led to an immediate drop in usage when introduced in 2019. But, despite rampant inflation, the tax has risen from 0.25TL in 2019 to just 1TL ($0.02), meaning it’s several times less in real terms than in 2019.
“You can’t even buy chewing gum with one lira,” said Gündoğdu. “If you see one lira on the ground, you will not take it. So that’s why it’s meaningless.” Butan added that the government did not invest in creating behavioural changes among the public, such as encouraging them to shop with reusable textile tote bags. “They just put in the tax and they didn’t do the rest,” he said.
Landfills tidied up but still leaking methane
While the amount of waste generated keeps rising, there has been progress in dealing with the waste so that it is at least out of sight. Official statistics suggest more and more of it is being collected and, while the vast majority is still sent to landfill rather than recycled, those landfills are now covered and more advanced than they used to be.
On the outskirts of Ankara, waste management company ITC gave Climate Home News a presentation showing one such transformation. A before image shows what the nearby Mamak landfill looked like in 2006 – a huge open pile of garbage known in Türkiye as a “wild landfill”.
Another image shows what the site looks like now with the rubbish covered up with soil. ITC says that Ankara’s garbage is brought to them on trucks, and sorted into recyclables and biodegradable waste, which is then turned into compost or burned for energy. Waste heat is used to grow blueberries, tomatoes and lavender or to warm shoppers in a nearby branch of the Swedish furniture giant Ikea.
But despite this progress, satellite observations from Carbon Mapper shows the site is still leaking methane – a particularly potent greenhouse gas – into the atmosphere. Exactly how much is unclear from Carbon Mapper’s limited observations but the nearby Sincan landfill leaks about 1,200 kilogrammes of methane an hour into the atmosphere. Climate Home News analysis suggests this does similar damage to the climate as 73,000 petrol cars. ITC did not respond to a request for comment.
In October, a Guardian investigation showed these methane leaks were happening at landfills across Türkiye and are some of the worst in the world. Researchers from the University of California (UCLA) said they were “mind-boggingly large”. Aside from the climate damage, local residents near one Istanbul landfill report a smell so bad they told the Guardian they have to sleep with their windows closed even on hot summer nights.
Waste imports from Europe
Dealing with its own growing waste is difficult enough, but Türkiye also imports mountains of plastic from its European neighbours too. Ever since China restricted waste imports, the European Union has exported more plastic waste to Türkiye than to any other nation by far.
Despite European Commission concerns about how well Türkiye deals with the waste, the trade is expected to grow as an EU ban on exports to non-OECD countries – a category that does not include Türkiye – comes into force on November 21.
The export of waste to Türkiye has seen European countries accused of waste imperialism. Butan and Gündoğdu said Türkiye should ban waste imports. But COP31 President and Turkish environment minister Kurum pushed back on this during a press conference in Trabzon in September.
“You called it waste imperialism,” he said through a translator, but “nobody is forcing anyone” to import waste. He added that handling the waste creates jobs in Türkiye and that it doesn’t matter to the environment where the waste is recycled as long as it is.
But most of Türkiye’s municipal waste is currently not recycled. Turkish official Yıldırım said that the country’s recovery rate is currently around 30%. The most recent statistics available from the EU suggest Türkiye in 2020 had a recycling rate of 12%. The EU country average in 2024 was about 50%.
At the zero waste centre in Ankara, Yıldırım said Türkiye is improving its recycling rate and wants to do even more. The aim, he said, is to reach a rate of 70% by an unspecified date, up there with global frontrunners like Germany.
To achieve that, he said Türkiye is raising awareness of the importance of recycling including through cartoons for children and initiatives for football supporters to collect and redistribute unwanted toys.
As he spoke to journalists, a portrait of the ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’ made from buttons, a sultan made from old plastic straws and a horse and wolf made from metal cogs and screws looked on. “The world is something that has been entrusted to us, and waste is something you steal from the future,” said Yıldırım.
Climate Home News’ travel and accommodation for the trip on which much of this article was reported was funded by the Turkish government.
The post Türkiye pushes “zero waste” at COP31, but is it delivering at home? appeared first on Climate Home News.
https://www.climatechangenews.com/2026/11/11/turkiye-pushes-zero-waste-at-cop31-but-is-it-delivering-at-home/
More than 92,000 people have registered to attend the COP31 climate summit in Antalya, Turkey, potentially making it the largest COP in history.
Carbon Brief analysis of the provisional lists of delegates, published by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), reveals that more than 14,000 delegates have been registered as “host country guests”.
For comparison, the provisional list for COP30 in Belém, Brazil, last year included only around 1,000 delegates in this category.
As with COP30, Donald Trump’s US government has not sent a delegation. Other no-shows include Israel and Myanmar.
It was reported ahead of the summit that Taliban officials from Afghanistan had been registered for the event as observers; however, there are no delegates from observer states in the provisional lists.
With more than 3,000 “virtual” delegates signed up to attend the summit online, the total number of people registered for the event surpasses 95,000.
Further analysis of the participant lists will be added to this article in due course.
Party delegates
With 92,934 participants registered, COP31 is provisionally the largest COP in history – topping COP28 in Dubai, which was attended by more than 80,000 people.
This total is based on the delegates that have registered to be at the summit in person. The UNFCCC releases the final figures – based on participants collecting a physical badge at the venue – after the summit has ended.
The chart below shows how the provisional figures for COP31 compare to the final totals in previous COPs – going back to COP1 in Berlin in 1995.
The participant lists provided by the UNFCCC are divided between the different types of groups and organisations attending the summit. The largest group at COP31 is for delegates representing parties. These are nation-states, plus the European Union, that have ratified the convention and play a full part in negotiations.
This group adds up to 18,812 delegates – the second largest after COP28.
Membership
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(In keeping with recent COPs, the UNFCCC has published spreadsheets that name every single person that has registered for the summit – excluding support staff. Previously, COPs have typically included thousands of “overflow” participants in which countries and UN agencies could nominate delegates without their names appearing on their official lists.)
For consistency with Carbon Brief’s analysis of previous COPs, the above chart includes overflow delegates as a single group. However, the participant lists do divide the overflow delegates between parties and observer groups. Including the overflow numbers takes the total for party representatives to more than 34,000.
Nations
The map and table below present the delegation size – split between party and overflow badges – for all the countries registered for COP31. The darker the shading, the more delegates that country has signed up. Use the search box to find the data for a specific party.
Unsurprisingly, host nation Turkey has registered the largest delegation for COP31 – with 2,950 people.
Following behind are Brazil (1,994 people), Nigeria (1,506), China (1,021) and Indonesia (978).
The rest of the top 10 is made up of Australia (835), Uganda (627), Italy (607), Japan (588) and Kazakhstan (557).
The UK comes someway down the list with a delegation of 255.