Carbon Pulse

EU environment ministers reached an agreement on Tuesday on the proposal for a nature restoration law, moving ahead of the divided European Parliament in the bloc's parallel lawmaking process.

Average CO2 emissions of new cars and vans in Europe dropped for a third consecutive year in 2022, according to provisional data published Tuesday, with pure EVs or hybrids representing nearly one in four car registrations.

European carbon climbed to a three-day high on Tuesday as the market began to focus on Wednesday's June options contract expiry and also drew support from renewed strength in natural gas.

Voluntary carbon market actors are teaming up to help de-risk investments, with two firms developing jurisdictional-level policy risk assessments for carbon credit buyers while two more work on getting early-stage project development to be comprehensive enough to insure.

China appeared to strike a milder tone regarding its opposition to the EU's carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) at this month's WTO talks, though the country's next step against the planned carbon border measure remains unclear, according to analysts.

Australia’s world-first nature repair market legislation is in jeopardy following the opposition Coalition’s decision to withdraw its support.

The world's ten major multilateral development banks (MDBs) have published a set of joint methodological principles to ensure the alignment of their new operations and financial flows with the mitigation and adaptation goals of the Paris Agreement.

The Clean Energy Regulator has issued some 1.1 million Australian Carbon Credit Units (ACCUs), the largest single issuance in 2023 thus far and with human-induced regeneration (HIR) projects back among recipients, as the head of Australia’s energy market warned the country is not investing in renewables fast enough in line with its climate goals.

A daily summary of our news plus bite-sized updates from around the world.

Policy observers and market participants have welcomed some of the policy options raised by the New Zealand government’s proposed overhaul of the ETS, but say it will do little to allay the uncertainty in the market ahead of the national election.

The EU climate targets for 2040 must be ambitious but realistic, according to the bloc's power market association Eurelectric, which advocated a goal less ambitious than those of the bloc's climate science advisors. 

InterOpera, a blockchain infrastructure provider backed by Vertex Ventures, Kakao Investments, and Korea Investment Partners, has launched a carbon credit and renewable energy certificate exchange platform.

Reinsurance giant Munich Re is offering a new institutional investment product based on the EU carbon market.

A bill to make the US Forest Service’s forest inventory analysis programme (FIA) easily accessible to the public was introduced to both houses of Congress by a bipartisan team of representatives and senators over the past month.

Carbon Vista, a joint venture between the Nigeria Sovereign Investment Authority (NSIA) and energy and commodity trader Vitol, has signed deal with Saudi Arabia’s Regional Voluntary Carbon Market Company (RVCMC) to channel climate finance into Nigeria.

The EU’s 27 national energy ministers failed to agree a unified stance on the bloc’s electricity market reform proposal on Monday as several nations refused to extend subsidies to coal power plants due to climate concerns.

REDD+ avoided deforestation prices continued to tick higher over the past week, but the avoidance credit market was a mixed bag of slight falls and gains as the overhang of available credits continued to grow, although nature-based removals commanded high prices.

The problem with carbon offsetting as a means for companies to bear responsibility for their emissions is not the concept itself, but its current implementation. Rather than limiting the use of carbon offsetting by banning terms like “carbon neutral”, policymakers should drive forward reforms to improve the quality of the carbon market, writes Lasse Leipola of Finnwatch.

The voluntary carbon market will consider credits tagged as aligning with the core carbon principles (CCPs) as a "minimum bar" on which to build, according to the CEO of an exchange.

The ecological success of the voluntary biodiversity credit market will be almost entirely determined by the quality of the governance mechanisms and the measurement methods used, according to a leading biodiversity finance researcher.