Media: Baku’s COP29 scores early win with carbon market standards deal

The world's leading media wrote about the first major success achieved on the first day of the 29th session of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP29) taking place in Baku - reaching a consensus on standards for creating carbon dioxide emission credits.

Caliber.Az writes, citing the Financial Times article: A deal to launch multibillion-dollar carbon markets governed by UN rules on emissions has been agreed at the COP29 climate summit, as countries attempt to show the fight against climate change will persist despite last week’s election of Donald Trump.

In the first symbolic negotiating breakthrough, the COP29 presidency pushed successfully on Monday for countries to adopt rules on a global market for trading instruments representing carbon emissions.

Carbon trading could help raise some of the cash that developing countries will need to adapt to the effects of climate change, while helping big polluters cut their emissions, in a win for COP29 host Azerbaijan ahead of tough negotiations on other types of finance.

It was a “rare bright spot of cooperation and progress emerging from COP29”, said Fitri Wulandri, an analyst at carbon data provider Veyt.

“Countries at the two-week COP29 climate summit gave the go-ahead on Monday to carbon credit quality standards which are critical to launching a U.N.-backed global carbon market that would fund projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” according to an article by Reuters journalists Virginia Furness and Kate Abnett.

The green light was an early deal on day one of the U.N. conference in Baku, Azerbaijan. Governments are also meant to hammer out a climate finance agreement, although expectations have been muted by Donald Trump's U.S. election win.

The article, citing Juan Carlos Arredondo Brun, a former climate negotiator for Mexico who now works for carbon market data and souring company Abatable, said that carbon credits theoretically allow countries or companies to pay for projects anywhere on the planet that reduce CO2 emissions or remove it from the atmosphere and use credits generated by those projects to offset their own emissions.

Reuters writes that the International Emissions Trading Association, a business group that backs global carbon markets, has said total trading in the UN-backed market could by 2030 generate $250 billion a year and cut 5 billion metric tons of carbon output annually.

According to a Bloomberg article by correspondent John Ainger, climate negotiators secured a breakthrough on day one of the COP29 climate summit by agreeing on rules for a United Nations-administered global carbon market.

The article emphasizes that proponents argue the new market will form the gold standard for emissions trading, unlocking billions in finance for emissions mitigation projects in the developing world. Buyers, mostly in wealthier countries, would be able to meet their climate goals by buying credits from projects that cut pollution.

The rules, dubbed “Article 6.4” after the initial proposals under the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement, stipulate how countries should trade carbon credits through a UN-operated marketplace. They have been log-jammed in recent years due to disagreements on their integrity, or how to make sure that any promised emissions reductions are additional and can be easily verified.

The Guardian quotes Mukhtar Babayev, President of COP29, in a published article about this important agreement: “We welcome this positive moment. It is a spirit of compromise for the success of all our discussions in Baku.”

The article says: “Carbon markets are a polarising force in climate policy. Advocates of this consensus say it will help channel critical funds to save the planet. Efforts to harmonise carbon market rules, known in COP language as Article 6.”

By Khagan Isayev