Climate change: China’s voluntary carbon market a step closer to relaunch after suspension for underuse in 2017

China has moved a step closer to rebooting its suspended voluntary carbon market, the China Certified Emission Reduction (CCER) scheme, a part of its plans to develop a more comprehensive market mechanism to support the country’s greenhouse gas emissions goals.

China Beijing Green Exchange, which oversees the scheme, announced on Saturday that it has finished developing the registration and trading systems for CCER, and that these are ready for inspection before operations resume. These, it said, are “important infrastructure for building the voluntary carbon market.”

First launched in 2012, the CCER scheme was suspended in March 2017 by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), China’s central economic planner, because of low trading volume and a lack of standardisation in carbon audits. Applications for new CCER projects have been suspended ever since, but transactions, deliveries, and the decommissioning of existing CCERs were unaffected.

CCER is considered an important supplementary mechanism to China’s national Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), the world’s largest carbon market in terms of the emissions it covers, when it comes to achieving China’s goal of reaching peak emissions by 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060.

Its relaunch will greatly boost the development of carbon reduction projects such as clean energy, afforestation – planting trees on previously non-forested land – and methane utilisation, said Yuan Li, an analyst at Shanghai-listed Soochow Securities, in a report on Monday.

Learn more: South China Morning Post