According to a United Nations climate official nations could begin the first global framework to oversee carbon markets as early as next month should they overcome resistance from some countries.
A staged approach under the UN would begin with more transparency among countries favouring markets as a climate-protection policy.
Bloomberg newsagency reports that is the view of Niclas Svenningsen, manager of strategy, collaboration and communication in the Sustainable Development Mechanisms program at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Bonn.
The European Union, Indonesia and the United States are among supporters of rules to ensure internationally traded emission credits properly represent greenhouse-gas savings, according to submissions to the UNFCCC.
A global overseer would boost private-sector confidence in the efforts, Anthony Hobley, president of the Climate Markets and Investment Association, a lobby group that includes JPMorgan Chase and Co and Cargill, told Bloomberg.
“The first stage could be implemented quickly because it’s an exchange of information,” Bonn-based Mr Svenningsen said.
“While the UNFCCC secretariat does not have experience rating carbon markets as such, we have more than a decade of unique experience and expertise.”
The UNFCCC oversees the Kyoto agreement to limit carbon emissions that was struck in 1997 and covers 37 developed nations and the EU.
It does not currently manage markets established in California or being set up in Brazil, China and Korea.
More than 50 jurisdictions of almost 200 have installed or are considering carbon markets, UN and World Bank data show.
Australia’s new conservative Liberal-National government is trying to dismantle the countries current carbon pricing legislation.
The secretariat can help ensure credits are created from projects or programs that wouldn’t have started without carbon finance, Mr Svenningsen said.
That ensures tradable credits are additional to what would have occurred without them.
The UNFCCC also has experience setting baselines to assess emission cuts and in accrediting audit firms to make sure projects obey rules, Mr Svenningsen said.
These are “all areas where the secretariat’s knowledge can be fast deployed,” he said.
“All the lessons we’ve learned during the past decade are available.”
An initial phase could begin after UN envoys meet in Warsaw starting on November 11, he said.
That meeting is to lay the groundwork for talks on a climate treaty in Paris in 2015, due to come into force five years later.
Nations should consider establishing an expert review process for international markets that fall under the rule system known as the “framework for various approaches,” the US said in a submission dated May 10 published on the UNFCCC website.
“This process would enable UNFCCC-expert and potentially independent-third-party review of the documentation and underlying programs and procedures,” it said.
A workshop last week in the German city Bonn failed to reach consensus on whether to establish the system, Mr Svenningsen said.
While nations agree that “there is a need to apply coherent rules that allow consistent tracking of units, so as to avoid double counting” of emission reductions, country views about how stringent the framework vary, he said.
