At United Nations climate talks underway in Poland governments want to launch a platform to help set common standards and accounting rules and tie together national and regional emissions trading schemes.
However, developing countries and green groups have warned that talk of a global carbon market is premature.
Reuters Newsagency reports almost 200 nations are in Poland for Conference of Parties (COP19) meeting to plan a 2015 UN deal in Paris that would start to tackle climate change from2020.
Most developed countries see carbon markets as crucial under any new agreement because they seek out the cheapest emissions reductions, making climate change targets more achievable.
More than 40 mainly developed countries, including New Zealand and members of the European Union, have, or are in the process of developing, markets to help cut their output of climate-warming emissions by putting a price on carbon dioxide.
Australia’s newly elected conservative Liberal-National government is going against the trend by introducing measures to repeal the country’s carbon price laws.
Reuters reports as the many global schemes are disconnected from each other, governments have proposed launching a framework to unite them under a single voluntary platform to share ideas, with a view to eventually launching a global market to battle climate change.
“Markets are vital and it’s not premature to be discussing them.
“It’s more than timely to be thinking now, in advance of 2015, about how to manage their intersection,” said New Zealand’s climate change ambassador Jo Tyndall, adding there was a clear link between carbon markets and channeling climate finance to poor countries.
Ms Tyndall said the platform, a concept floated by Poland earlier this year, would be a “toolbox” that provides a variety of tools to help develop technical standards and best practice approaches to build trading rules that could underpin a global market.
It would also codify transparency and accounting standards that are “fundamental to ensure all mitigation tools and options, including carbon markets, have environmental integrity and will avoid double-counting emissions cuts,” she added.
“We have a whole series of different mechanisms all over the world so should we wait until Paris to start thinking what would be useful to have in 2021, or should we look at what we are doing already?”, said Poland’s Tomasz Chruszczow, chair of one UN’s negotiating streams.
However, poor nations argue that more pressing issues need to be ironed out, for example the overarching dispute between rich and poor countries over how to share efforts to cut emissions, before more market-based mechanisms are developed or the groundwork for a global trading scheme is laid.
“A market is important but it’s premature to deliver it now with so many other issues that have to be resolved before 2015,” said Khalid Abuleif, an advisor to Saudi Arabia’s ministry of petroleum and mineral resources and the country’s lead negotiator at the UN talks.
“Let’s not bring markets in to influence that process.”
Reuters reports emerging economies like Saudi Arabia and China, the world’s top emitter, want rich countries to commit to doing more to cut greenhouse gas output while allowing poorer nations to burn more fossil fuels to build their economies and end poverty.
“The toolbox is not about establishing yet another mechanism to produce units that no one will buy, it’s about understanding what we are doing collectively, which is very helpful in understanding how a new global agreement might work,” Poland’s Mr Chruszczow said.
Green groups including the Third World Network have called the idea a “recipe for disaster”, saying governments are pushing forward with building new markets before studying and learning from the failings of existing ones.
