PRE FORUM SUMMARY

In response to recent corporate net zero commitments, VCM activity has spiked. The University College London forecasts the global VCM to grow to ~$20 billion per annum by 2030 compared to $0.33 billion in 2020. On the other hand, the Taskforce on Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets (TSVCM) estimates the Voluntary Carbon Market to reach $100b by 2030, assuming an increase in quantity and price. Though these estimations vary greatly between each other, they both stay within the billion level and there is no doubt of a large market growth in the incoming years.

However, offsetting carbon emissions has created great controversy and companies are worried of investing in project that don't actually reduce / avoid emissions. To date, there are 4 main leading standard companies in which almost every carbon offset aligns: VERRA, Climate Action Reserve, GoldStandard and the American Carbon Registry. However, these standards leave space for the creation of offsets that don't really offset any carbon. Additionally, there are two types of offsets:

• Carbon removal: projects that actually draw carbon dioxide from the atmosphere
• Carbon avoidance: projects that avoid an emission from happening, such as avoided deforestation.

The latter are based on the idea that if the project were not there, the forest would be cut out. As we will see during our session, this is a topic that has led to great controversy owing to the fact that carbon offset estimates are not specifically based on the CO₂ offset. We have designed this session to explain how the VCM works, see who are the players in this market space and know what concepts are important to take into account to ensure that you are purchasing a "true" carbon offset.

POST FORUM SUMMARY

During this event, the Darcy Team introduced to topic of Voluntary Carbon Markets (VCM) going initially through:

• The differences between voluntary and compliance markets,
• The type of existing offsets classified by technology and process,
• The 10 Core Carbon Principles offsets need to follow to actually offset emissions
• The players in the VCM space
• A VCM Vendor Landscape (you can see the Darcy Overview here)

Then two innovators presented their technologies:

• Renoster (Video here) - An Offset Rating company that rates carbon offsets according to the amount of carbon dioxide actually removed / avoided.
• Allied Offsets (video here) - A Data Analytics platform that takes open information from the registries and showcase it in dashboards for better decision making. These dashboards include offset pricing, offset retirement per company / company type, etc.

Finally, two operators joined the session:

• Olivier Lejeune, from Quantum Commodity Intelligence - Olivier is an Energy Transition Analyst and Journalist that is following the carbon markets and who took part of COP27 this year, focusing on the development on Article 6. He joined the session to share his views on the offset rating space and specifically of Renoster (watch here)
• Jake Goedhuis, from Respira International - Respira is a Carbon Offset marketplace that has a partnership with Allied Offsets to access their information and uses the available dashboards to understand trends and pricing in the VCM space (watch here)