The voluntary carbon market, which lets corporate polluters fund global climate projects to offset their own emissions, is expected to get significant new oversight Friday aimed at addressing concerns that the projects don’t actually address climate change.
A U.S. financial regulator will vote on new policies to require projects that are funded through the market and involve certain types of complex transactions to demonstrate their effectiveness.
The voluntary carbon market has raised billions of dollars for projects such as wind-power plants in Turkey and Vietnam. But investors and analysts are increasingly concerned that the corporate money is not addressing climate change because the projects could have been completed without the funding.
“There’s been a lot of concern about the integrity of the [voluntary] carbon market,” said Eric Pitt, chief commercial officer of Emergent, a nonprofit working in carbon markets to address global deforestation.
