Ecosystem Marketplace: Voluntary Carbon Markets - Status at beginning of 2011

As Ecosystem Marketplace wishes you and yours some New Years luck in this special edition, we offer a look back at 2010 – replaying your reader-ranked Top (20)10 Stories and sage predictions for the coming year from some of the market’s most influential players.

The voluntary carbon market experienced a series of meaningful wins peppered with some striking losses in 2010. Fortunately, veterans of the tumultuous 2009 market [8] emerged from “Nopenhagen [9]” with more realistic expectations about the coming year – in which political indecision heralded the downturn (or emergence) of compliance markets while non-regulated buyers' investments continued to ride the wave of economic downturn to recovery.

As it became clear that the US Senate would not agree upon meaningful climate legislation, pre-compliance demand fell and the Chicago Climate Exchange – already painfully oversupplied – shuttered the doors on its voluntary carbon trading program [10] at the end of 2010.
 
Some market players turned to California, where the state’s AB32 cap-and-trade program cleared the ballot challenge hurdle and was approved by regulators [11] – making way for the scheme’s use of several carbon offset protocols first employed in the voluntary market and for surrounding jurisdictions to tackle the details of their own carbon trading programs in line with their Western Climate Initiative (WCI) commitments.

California also recognized what voluntary carbon buyers have known [12] for years about the carbon mitigation potential of reduced emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD). Market participants that scaled up 2010 forestry activities [13] in anticipation of a UNFCCC REDD agreement were vindicated by Cancun's REDD and REDD+ outcomes [14] – notably at the sub-national level.

In fact, domestic efforts reigned in 2010, which saw the emergence of the first sub-national environmental asset registry [15], real results from the Governors Climate and Forests Task Force (GCF) [16], a host of provincial pilot low-carbon programs [17] across China and a loose network of proposed carbon trading schemes and bi-lateral agreements on REDD finance to carry market activity into the new year.

Readers cited these and other stories as the most important developments in the 2010 voluntary carbon market. Check out the ranking below and read some insightful predictions from a few movers, shakers – and V-Carbon readers.