A group spanning project developers, corporate purchasers and some of the better-known conservation NGOs has moved against draft UN rules that would protect carbon credits against later losses from fire, drought or logging, Climate Home News reported. Critics of the effort, cited by the outlet, characterised it as a "coordinated lobbying campaign" aimed at undermining efforts to strengthen market integrity.
At issue is a proposal from July by the technical UN panel writing rules for the Article 6.4 mechanism, the framework behind credits that governments and firms may count toward their climate targets. Under that proposal, developers would have to set the size of their insurance pools of credits using local risk values drawn from newly published work by a group of independent scientists, according to Climate Home News.
The July design replaces a uniform assumption with site-specific calibration, so the volume of credits a developer must hold back rises where reversal risk is measured to be higher.
The UN secretariat's call for external feedback drew lengthy submissions from more than 30 organisations. Climate Home News examined them and found the arguments converged closely; in several instances, passages and in some cases whole submissions appeared in identical form under different organisations' names.
One example the outlet cites is Apple, whose filing tracks an input from the Beyond Alliance, a grouping of corporate buyers and NGOs that advocates market-based climate investment, with only light editing.
Scope at the start would be limited. Climate Home News reported that the rules would apply first only to clean cookstove projects, among the market's most widely sold and most criticised credit categories.
The panel takes up the reversal risk tool, and the question of which projects it covers, during a five-day session in Bonn this week. Its recommendations then pass to the Supervisory Body, the mechanism's regulator, which meets in early October to decide whether to adopt them, according to Climate Home News.
The Supervisory Body therefore holds the vote, not the panel that drafted the method. Should the tool reach that meeting unchanged and win approval, cookstove developers would size their buffers against externally published risk values. Should the submissions succeed, the calibration is diluted while cookstove projects remain the only credit type covered.