Negotiations at the UN Cop 26 climate conference in Glasgow have moved closer to reaching an agreement on the contentious rulebook for Article 6 of the Paris climate agreement.
In the most recent draft text put forward this morning, sets of options that had been laid out in the previous iteration had been removed, indicating that parties were moving closer to consensus. But the whole of Article 6.2 and 6.4, which relate to international carbon trading, remained in square brackets and are therefore not yet officially agreed.
Amendments have been made relating to all three issues that have proved to be sticking points in negotiations at both this and previous conferences — corresponding adjustments to prevent double counting of credits; the carryover of pre-2020 credits; and the share of proceeds, which refers to the levy on some bilateral trade of carbon credits to help provide adaption finance.
The most recent text specifies that a corresponding adjustment must be applied to all Article 6.4 credits counted towards nationally determined contributions or used for "other international mitigation purposes".
This replaces an option floated in the previous version of the text, which was supported by both Brazil and the US, to introduce separate types of credits, "Paris Agreement Adjustment Units" (PAAUs) and the "Paris Agreement Support Units" (PASUs).
PAAUs would have been adjusted by the host country of the project generating the unit so that double counting is avoided, assuming the credit is then exported abroad. PASUs would not have been adjusted by the host country and so would essentially be a climate finance contribution to the carbon reduction project and would not be authorised to count towards compliance.
A section in the previous draft which had implied that REDD+ credits could be carried over for use in the new offset scheme to be set up under Article 6.4 has been removed. But certified emissions reductions (CERs) issued from 2013 onwards would be allowed, which compares with bracketed options of either 2013 or 2016 in the previous iteration.
In the most recent draft, the share of proceeds and cancellation of credits for the overall mitigation in global emissions under Article 6.2 are "strongly encouraged" but are voluntary, removing options in the previous draft to make them compulsory.
Brazil has said today that it will support the text as it is. "It struck a delicate balance that we had not seen before. They are not perfect but they are workable," the country's chief climate negotiator Paulino Franco de Carvalho Neto said.
