Navigating Voluntary Carbon Offset Markets — Net-Zero Carbon

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On this episode of Net-Zero Carbon, Danny Gomez, managing director of financial and emerging markets at FreightWaves, chats with Dan Scarbrough, president and COO at IncubEx, and Andrew Hall, director of sustainable finance at Trayport. 

This is the third episode in a series about the journey to emissions reduction, including measuring greenhouse gas emissions, reducing emissions, and purchasing voluntary carbon credits to offset unavoidable emissions.

"It's very important, first and foremost, to get your carbon accounting right. You need to know your footprint and your scope 1, scope 2, and scope 3 emissions," Scarbrough said.

The three discussed how the environmental commodities market is growing in complexity, interest, and scale. Scarbrough said that companies are starting to look more at the tools available to them for reducing emissions: direct carbon investments, renewable energy certificates, and carbon offsets.

Carbon credits can come from a variety of carbon-reducing projects such as agricultural methane capture, reforestation, and deforestation prevention, to name a few. 

Each solution has different impacts on the environment such as direct or indirect emissions reductions and potential co-benefits, Hall said. For example, planting trees reduces carbon emissions, but it also benefits forests, promotes biodiversity, and provides habitats for animals.

Read: Alternative low-carbon fuels predicted to ‘steal headlines'

"The first thing to do is to have an understanding of what type of offset it is that you're looking for because there's quite a range of pricing across the different standards as well as the protocols that exist within the standards," Hall said. 

The Trayport platform can provide transparency for companies looking into carbon offsets, and companies can choose which type of offsets they want to purchase, Hall said.

"Who knows where the price of voluntary carbon credits is going to go? But it feels like they're going up, so it may be a good time to try to lock in some of that," Gomez said.

Environmental commodities

There are environmental compliance markets that are government-mandated, and then there are voluntary markets with entities with their own rule sets and geographies, Scarbrough said.

"With the current state of affairs where only about 10% of the emission footprint globally is covered by these compliance programs, the voluntary market will have to grow," Scarbrough said.

He said the environmental commodity space has "developed significantly" and is "scaling at an unprecedented rate."

View all of FreightWaves' Net-Zero Carbon episodes and sustainability stories.

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This post contains sponsored advertising content. This content is for informational purposes only and not intended to be investing advice

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