Global trade in carbon is a growing business with quadrupling in international carbon sales in 2006 at over $25B USD according to the World Bank. The New York Times presented carbon trading as one of the fastest growing trades, with companies scrambling to get a slice of a market now worth about $30 billion and could grow to $1 trillion within a decade. Carbon trading is the new big thing according to “In London’s Financial World”. Carbon will be the world’s biggest commodity market, and it could become the world’s biggest market over all, it added.

Alberta Climate Change and Emissions Management Act 2007, and British Columbia Greenhouse Gas Reduction Targets Act or Cap and Trade Act, 2008, pave the way for industrial plants in these provinces, to take action to mitigate their carbon intensity, including buying of carbon credits to offset and meet their greenhouse gas emissions intensity target, thereby pioneering carbon trading in these provinces and Canada at large.

The government of Stephen Harper, through the newly designed Canadian Offset System, has boost the carbon trade by its commitment to reduce Canada’s total greenhouse gas emissions by 20% below 2006 levels by 2020. The Offset System is designed to encourage cost-effective domestic reductions or removals in activities or sectors that are not covered by the planned federal greenhouse gas emissions regulations. Projects that satisfy the eligibility criteria can receive offset credits that can be sold in the market. Like Canada, the US Climate Security Act of 2008 establishes a market-driven system of tradable emission allowances and permits the use of domestic offsets and international credits.

The Bali, Indonesia, UN Climate Change Conference in 2007, like the voices of environmental campaigners going into the next UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, called for the crediting of local indigenous communities in post Kyoto to reduce deforestation and provide economic benefits to communities involve.

With good climate change policies in place, we wait to see how effective these new systems will be in regulating this new lucrative industry on both sides of the border, as well as, how indigenous communities with large stretch of forested and non-forested land will benefit from it.

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Tags: carbon, carbon trading, greenhouse gas

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