Handel (-Zertifikaten)

The World Bank has launched a €68m (£57m) pot of funding aimed at enabling carbon-cutting projects to keep selling UN-backed offsets after the first phase of the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012.

Forest carbon payments – payments for restoring or planting forest, or for preventing forest degradation or deforestation – can help to prevent and reverse forest loss.

A major Japanese bank has come back for a second helping of New Zealand forestry credits. The deal, finalised last week, is being seen as a positive step in the developing international market for New Zealand’s forestry credits.

Africa’s first significant CDM forest carbon project has attracted a price of $US4 per tonne in temporary CER (tCER) carbon credits, according to a media report. The World Bank will buy the credits for half the carbon stored up to 2017 from an Ethiopian forestry project, the Humbo Assisted Natural Regeneration Project.

The voluntary carbon market remains sluggish, hit hard by the global financial crisis and ongoing worldwide recession, but life is flickering in the forest carbon segment.

Voluntary carbon buyers are in the market but taking much longer to carry out their buying programmes knowing they are in a good position to hold out and squeeze prices down, says David Pontis, an emissions broker at Tullet Prebon. Organisations are still offsetting but the market appears to be 70 per cent sellers and 30 per cent buyers currently, Pontis said.