A United Nations panel said on Thursday it is tackling a backlog of carbon offset issuances and hopes to clear it by the time of U.N. climate talks in Mexico’s Cancun at the end of November.
“It is something we are working hard on. We will be addressing the backlog by Cancun,” Martin Hession, vice chairman of the Clean Development Mechanism’s Executive Board (EB), said in a webcast of its monthly meeting in Bonn, Germany.
Under the U.N.’s Clean Development Mechanism, firms can invest in greenhouse gas cuts in emerging countries such as China or India and in return get offsets called Certified Emissions Reductions (CERs), which can be used toward emissions targets or sold for profit.
The suspension of project auditors and this summer’s review of projects which destroy the greenhouse gas HFC-23 has meant that backlogs of approved projects requesting CERs and new projects seeking approval has built up.
However, some investors have noticed a speeding up of CER issuance in the past few weeks.
But concerns about the backlog remain.
“We are not seeing movement toward moving the backlog,” Kim Carnahan from the International Emissions Trading Association said at the meeting.
However, board member Lex de Jonge said the EB was putting pressure on the U.N.’s Secretariat to increase the staff working on issuances.
“By the end of this year or beginning of next year the backlogs should be gone,” he said. “However, if we received good quality (projects) we would not be having this discussion.”
