But while we dither over not just how to find a solution but whether we have a problem, the costs of dealing with climate change are rising along with atmospheric temperatures. That means lower crop yields, more natural disasters, and higher degrees of risk across all sectors. It also means that by the time we get our act together, we’ll have pitifully few people with the skills needed to get us out of this mess.
Fortunately, a handful of governments and governmental agencies have recognized this dilemma, and are acting to correct it by engaging the voluntary carbon markets, which operate outside government bureaucracies and have evolved a slew of tested methods that work.
My colleague at Ecosystem Marketplace, Molly Peters-Stanley, has identified more than 20 governmental programs that either support or adopt tools that evolved in the voluntary markets. She spent the last two months putting together incredibly readable case studies on the 13 most advanced initiatives, and the result is a report entitled Bringing it Home: Taking Stock of Government Engagement with the Voluntary Carbon Market , which I wrote about here.
Three of the programs she profiled are in the US states of Oklahoma, California, and Oregon. The others are a combination of national and sub-national initiatives across Latin America, Europe, and Asia, and all have one thing in common: they aim to incubate and incentivize solutions that suit their own local economies and philosophies.
In Oklahoma, for example, participation is voluntary, and the government limits its role to certifying the companies that verify emission reductions and nurturing agreement on how to measure the types of GHG reduction projects likely to be pursued in the state – such as grassland management and climate-safe farming. California and Oregon, on the other hand, have implemented mandatory emission caps, but in ways that incorporate elements from time-tested voluntary programs.
Nine of the 20 or so programs that Molly found have sprung up within the last four years – and one might soon be underway in South Africa. In each case, governments are moving beyond their traditional role of providing oversight for voluntary offsetting programs into performing services that support the creation of markets, but they're doing so in ways that respond to user demand. It's a grand experiment that should help us identify the "sweet spot" where government does what it does best, the private sector does what it does best, and the UN does what it does best. Buyers, for their part, seem to like the hybrid approach: prices for offsets in the 13 programs averaged $11 per ton of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e), compared to the $6 per ton we found in our most recent State of the Voluntary Carbon Markets report.
No one really knows which of these programs will succeed, but this kind of experimentation will help us see what works, what doesn't, and why. That's something we'll need if we're to have a fighting chance of fixing this debacle.
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