Today is the Eighth Day of cop 29 in the second week and I’m here outside the negotiation rooms tracking article 6 of carbon markets article 6 is about carbon markets and non-carbon Market approaches but the focus of the two key parts of article 6 article 6.2 and 6.4 is about carbon markets when the article 6.4 negotiation started one of the first interventions was by Coalition for rainforest Nations and what they did was they criticized the approach that was taken on the Inaugural Day basically saying that it has lost trust in the supervisory body the kind of mandate that the supervisory body had been given in this one of the important element is what sort of direction do party countries need to provide the supervisory body to do its function and some of the elements of this guidance are how supervisory body can take uh scientific advice from panel of experts for further development of guidance for further development of standards and what it needs to do to get the mechanisms registry up and running so these are some of the broad uh themes that the uh the 6.4 discussions are dealing with today 6.2 is relatively a more vol voluntary mechanism where countries can deal between themselves without having to follow uh strict rules like a centralized body that UNFCCC acts as developing countries the countries that mostly host these projects would want some sort of flexibility in the mechanism to not have too many rules that increases their compliance costs that increases their compliance measures something that they don’t want to do to rules that are being framed by developed countries which are generally the buying countries and want more transparent rules and more compliance to be brought into the mechanism but on the other hand this means that uh giving a free hand for so many countries to have their own standards in place this is a compromise with transparency accountability and ultimately the market Integrity in some way so what do we do I think one of the ways out is to uh make show that the review mechanism of the UNFCCC is robust so that when such deals happen the review spots the issues in these kinds of uh trades and the inconsistencies are brought to the for how do we Define a Cooperative approach how do we Define how countries enter into agreements to initiate the trade how do we make Provisions for changes to what is called as authorization the process by which countries decide whether or not they want to sell emission reduction units outside the country so these are also some of the issues that are being discussed under 6.2 beyond all of this uh the issue the broader issue with uh this discussion is whether this negotiation process would be able to provide for enough transparency enough environmental Integrity enough accountability in the process which will decide whether the market would be able to deliver on the faith that is placed upon them by the world
Down to Earth is Science and Environment fortnightly published by the Society for Environmental Communication, New Delhi. We publish news and analysis on issues that deal with sustainable development, which we scan through the eyes of science and environment.
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