Voluntary Carbon Credits Are Healthier Than Compliance: Jonathan Shopley

Wednesday, Jul 17, 2013, 12:07 IST | Agency: DNA R N Bhaskar       Jonathan Shopley, MD at The CarbonNeutral Company, a global provider of carbon reduction solutions to more than 350 companies, was the founding co-chair of The International Carbon Reduction and Offset Alliance, an industry body committed to defining and meeting the best practice in the carbon market, and is a board director of the Climate Markets and Investors Association. Jonathan Shopley He has authored publications across a range of topics including climate change, environmental management and sustainable development.  In this interview with R N Bhaskar, Shopley speaks about his work and what he expects from the markets. Excerpts: How big is the volume of business you do? Last year, we traded in around 11 million units of carbon, of which 2.2 million – approximately 20% – came from India.   We see the markets changing.  With the fall in carbon credit prices, thanks to the global economic slowdown, we see credits purchased and retired for corporates a better option than the compliance market driven by the Kyoto Convention. We see the non-regulatory action on climate, the voluntary market, growing at around 4% annually, even where the compliance market has crashed. This is to be expected, because as political will weakens, leading corporates – like Microsoft with whom we work worldwide – invariably step in. We see the private sector playing a critical role both in policy and market development, and even influencing regulation. What about global markets? As a survey by Ecosystems Marketplace, a Forest Trends Initiative, points out, voluntary demand for carbon offsetting grew 4% in 2012, when buyers committed more than $523 million to offset 101 million metric tonne of greenhouse gas emissions. The European private sector, including regulated energy utilities, was the market’s biggest voluntary buyer – seeing demand grow 34% to 43.4 million tonne of offsets even in the face of significant challenges to Europe’s mandatory carbon market.   US-based corporations offset more emissions than buyers in any other single country, at 28.7 million tonne. A little over a third of offsets purchased by US buyers (9.7 million tonne) were obtained for future use in California’s emerging cap-and-trade programme. The survey also reveals that last year, voluntary buyers paid a volume-weighted average price of $5.9/tonne – slightly down from 2011’s $6.2/tonne.  But it was significantly higher than the United Nations’s regulatory carbon offset price at less than a $1/tonne. How big is your organisation? Our headline numbers are that we have 35 people, 340 clients located in 34 countries.  All our clients are carbon-neutral, but want to do more. We have 200 projects that are supported.  As mentioned earlier, we have done around 11 million tonne of carbon last year.  And we are likely to get more active in India. Recently, we purchased a lookalike company in New York. Taylor Scott International