Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets: A Playbook for Corporate Action

There’s a lot we need to do to make voluntary carbon markets (VCMs) “work” and deliver on their potential. While direct mitigation (decarbonization) is the priority, VCMs provide a critical, complementary tool to support global climate action.

At scale, VCMs can serve as a valuable lever to combat the effects of climate change and deploy capital to support global net zero ambitions. But today they are falling short due to an imbalance of risk and reward.

To mitigate risk we need more robust and harmonized quality standards with clear disclosure frameworks. Media and NGOs should continue to interrogate market abuses, but should temper their criticism of companies acting with integrity in a nascent market. To enhance rewards, companies need concrete incentives that provide compelling strategic rationale for investment in high-quality carbon credits. Governments, standard setters, NGOs, and civil society should offer pragmatic recognition of efforts made by companies to “do more” through VCM investment, particularly when direct abatement may not be possible.

Opting out of the VCM because it’s imperfect and messy does the planet a potentially irreversible disservice. It won’t be easy to resolve these challenges, but we need to do the work to make it work.

What an incredible learning journey it has been to support the World Economic Forum and collaborate with so many inspiring companies to publish this report. Thank you Pedro G Gomez Pensado Nasim Pour Dale Hardcastle Henning Huenteler Ann Siml Nicholas Foreman and Ini Adelaja for leading the author team. And incredible behind-the-scenes work by Emily Norcliffe Ivy Langat Amita Singh and Peter Welch

Source:

https://www.weforum.org/publications/scaling-voluntary-carbon-markets-a-playbook-for-corporate-action/