Zimbabwe becomes 30th country to issue vintage 2021 credits

Quantum Commodity Intelligence - Zimbabwe has become the 30th country to issue 2021 vintage emissions credits, data from the main four registries showed Monday, amid uncertainty about post-2020 offsets with detailed negotiations about Article 6 of the Paris agreement still ongoing.

To date, a total of 23.3 million mt of vintage 2021 credits have been issued, against 24.3 million mt of vintage 2020 credits at the same time last year.

In April, Indonesia's government suspended validating some carbon projects in Sumatra and Kalimantan and put the issuance of vintage 2021 credits on hold.

The move spooked parts of the voluntary carbon market, but does not appear to have been followed by other prominent host countries at this stage.

The countries that had issued vintage 2020 credits at this time last year but have not released any vintage 2021 credits at the time of writing this article, are Argentina, Australia, Nepal, Bulgaria, Bolivia, Chile, Panama, Georgia, Costa Rica, Sierra Leone, Gambia, Ghana, Mauritius, Madagascar, Sudan, Honduras, Bangladesh, Benin, Canada, Togo, Peru, the Philippines, Haiti and the United Kingdom.

However, none of them rank as major producers of voluntary offsets: the volume of vintage 2020 offsets issued by these countries in 2021 amounted to just 790,000 mt, the data shows.

In most cases, the fall in issuance is likely to be related to economic decisions by project developers or to delays at validating bodies.

Carbon projects based in Indonesia have issued 112,000 mt of vintage 2021 credits to date with the latest issuance occurring at the end of February, but this is now on hold.

Climate talks held in Bonn, Germany, over the last two weeks have made progress in "several technical areas," but disagreements remained in others, according to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

After a week of debate, the UN has now formally appointed the supervisory board that will set high level and detailed rules on how a future global carbon market will work.

Under the Paris agreement, Article 6.2 covers the transfer of Internationally Transferred Mitigation Outcomes (ITMOs) between countries while Article 6.4 regulates carbon projects in countries and is the successor of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).

Industry sources said implementation of Article 6.4 is likely to take several more years.