Efforts by the United Nations to ease rules for carbon-cutting projects may encourage investments in small-scale projects in solar water heaters and efficient cookstoves in Africa and Asia.
The UN Clean Development Mechanism’s Executive Board, regulator of the world’s second-biggest carbon market by traded volume, agreed last week to consider ways to quicken the approval procedure for some emission-reduction activities. The new process would help ease difficulties facing projects that produce fewer emission reductions than others, including those that create usable fuel from animal dung and renewable energy initiatives small enough to power a light-bulb.
“It’s definitely a good thing,” Gareth Phillips, chief climate change officer at Sindicatum Sustainable Resources Group, a Singapore-based developer of carbon offset projects, said in a phone interview from Jakarta yesterday. “Small-scale projects sometimes end up being more complex and harder to do than normal-scale projects, because the methodologies are shorter and sometimes didn’t address questions that the auditors and regulators had, so they were left hanging.” Small-scale projects are defined by the UN as those generating less than 15,000 tons of credits a year.
Favored-activities list
UN Certified Emission Reduction credits for delivery in December have slumped 71 percent in the last 12 months to 3.65 euros ($4.69) a metric ton. The price plunged as a rush of investments boosted supplies while a failure of nations to agree on a global climate deal left the Europe Union, where CERs can be used for compliance with the bloc’s emissions trading system, as the main market for UN credits. They traded at a record low of 3.27 euros last month. China produces almost two-thirds of all credits, the first of which were issued in 2005.
The Executive Board wants to consider expanding a list of favored activities to include those that produce fewer offsets, according to a May 11 statement. The list identifies projects that are automatically deemed to require emission credits to make them financially viable, or “additional.”
CF Partners, a London-based fund that invests in emissions- cutting projects and matches credits to buyers, said it has funded rural biogas projects, which can be more difficult to develop despite the emissions savings and improvement in quality of life for communities they bring.
“The validation process is challenging when compared with more proven methodologies,” David Crowe, primary portfolio manager at CF Partners, said by e-mail. “Streamlining this process would encourage us to increase our investment in similar projects.”
Validation stage
The CDM Executive Board, which met to discuss new regulations last week in Bonn, also wants to look at slimming down or skipping the so-called validation stage, an early check to ensure a project will actually cut emissions and so may be approved to win credits.
Sindicatum said expanding the favored-activities list may make it quicker, easier and probably cheaper for some projects to get through the approval process. The list would allow the Executive Board to automatically deem some projects as additional, rather than seeking proof from each one that extra revenue from offsets is needed to make it viable.
About a quarter of the world’s population doesn’t have access to modern cooking fuels or electricity, forcing people to use kerosene-burning lamps for light, and wood and charcoal to cook food and boil water to make it safe for drinking, according to UN Environment Program figures.
‘Exciting initiative’
The new process may tempt investors to back projects previously bypassed in favor of industrial investments that generate more credits, such as those in China and India linked to hydro-fluorocarbons and adipic acid which make up 62 percent of all credits issued so far.
“This is an exciting initiative because it could spur a great many, very beneficial projects in regions that have yet to fully benefit from the CDM,” Maosheng Duan, chairman of the Executive Board, said in the e-mailed statement. “The next step is to come up with a workable proposal, one that reduces transaction costs yet ensures that the emission reductions produced are real, measurable and additional.”
Since the carbon offset program started accepting applications in 2003, it has taken more than a year on average for projects to complete the so-called validation stage. That time has shrunk to about 250 days on average for projects, according to figures for April based on analysis from the UN Environment Program’s Risoe Center.
Comfort for investors
Skipping a validation stage is done for some programs that create voluntary credits, which are used by corporations and individuals wishing to voluntarily offset emissions rather than doing so to comply with any laws. Even so, the validation stage gives investors confidence before committing money to projects, and removing that step may deter investment, Phillips said.
“From an investor’s point of view there is some comfort knowing that your project has been registered before you move ahead with an investment,” he said.
The UN’s carbon market was created by the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, an agreement ratified by 191 countries, excluding the US, that set emissions limits for developed countries in the eight years through to 2012. The market is governed by rules agreed under the Marrakech Accords in 2001. Nations are meeting this week in Bonn, to continue negotiations on climate protection agreements after 2012.
