+------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
IETA Urges Figueres' CO2 Revolution for 'Sloth-like' Credits
2010-08-06 12:07:13.564 GMT
By Catherine Airlie and Mathew Carr
Aug. 6 (Bloomberg) -- The International Emissions Trading
Association urged Christiana Figueres, the United Nation's newly
appointed climate chief, to spur a revolution in how carbon-
emission credits are made and measured in developing nations.
Progress in changing how the Clean Development Mechanism
works has been "sloth-like," Kim Carnahan, policy leader of
flexible mechanisms at IETA, a Geneva-based lobby for carbon
traders, said yesterday in an e-mailed statement.
The CDM, the world's largest offset market, was spawned in
2005 from the UN's Kyoto Protocol to help richer nations cut
pollution by investing in clean projects in developing
countries. The UN is seeking to boost the output of greenhouse-
gas credits as scientists say rising global emissions threaten
the climate.
The CDM needs to be 'revolutionized,' Figueres said in her
first address to the program's executive board. Rich nations may
drop participation in the system and prefer bilateral markets
with developing nations, Figueres, who took over the post from
Yvo De Boer last month, said at the July 29 meeting in Bonn.
The former Costa-Rican climate negotiator called for a
"quantum leap" in scaling up the executive board to be "able
to address the challenges of the future." The regulator must
change the way it asks emissions-cutting projects to measure
greenhouse-gas savings, Figueres said. "At some point we have
to make the decision of how are we going to measure and
particularly how do we smartly assess risk." There is "no
human way" of measuring every ton of carbon-dioxide savings,
she said.
'Begging'
"We have been begging for the CDM executive board to take
the 'quantum leap' she refers to for the past 3 years,"
Carnahan said.
The UNFCCC has issued 424 million tons of CER credits since
October 2005. They would be valued at 5.1 billion euros ($6.8
billion) based on a price of 12.10 euros a ton at 12:47 a.m. on
the European Climate Exchange in London. The credits, which can
be used in the European Union's system and for countries to meet
Kyoto targets, rose 0.3 percent today and 11 percent this year.
"There are fundamental challenges that I don't think we
will ever address," Martin Hession, a board member from the
U.K., said in the meeting. "At some point we will have to move
to other systems. This is an offset mechanism as it is currently
defined. It's a zero sum game."
For Related News and Information:
Emission market news NI ENVMARKET <GO>
Today's top energy stories ETOP <GO>
European power-markets home page EPWR <GO>
Sustainability, environmental indexes SEI <GO>
--Editors: Rob Verdonck, Raj Rajendran
To contact the reporter on this story:
Catherine Airlie at +44-20-7073-3308 or
cairlie@bloomberg.net
Mathew Carr in London at +44-20-7073-3531 or
m.carr@bloomberg.net;
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Stephen Voss at +44-20-7073-3520 or sev@bloomberg.net
