World Bank, partners launch tracking system to clean up carbon markets

The World Bank and partners including Singapore on Wednesday launched a global tracking system to clean up the opaque market for carbon credits and help developing countries raise much-needed climate finance quickly and more cheaply.

Carbon credits generated through activities such as planting forests or pulling climate-damaging carbon dioxide from the air are sold to polluters to offset their emissions as a way of helping them reach net-zero emissions to limit global warming.

While governments wrangle over the rules for trading so-called compliance credits, projects are being launched to generate new credits and countries are setting up registers to track them. Private-sector efforts also have sprung up offering credits for voluntary carbon markets, while a range of registries such as Verra and Gold Standard is accrediting and tracking them.

The new database called the Climate Action Data Trust (CADTrust) aims to address these issues by collating all the project and carbon credit data in one place and making it free to the public.

Chandra Shekhar Sinha an adviser of the Climate Change Group at the World Bank said, “The goal for us was to create this global, public data layer which allows people to get a better sense of what’s happening across the world, across different jurisdictions and across different programmes.”

Sonam Tashi chief planning officer at Bhutan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs said, “The CAD Trust, co-founded with the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA), will provide a platform listing various existing carbon offset registries to make it easier for companies and countries to share data.”