Writing the State of the Voluntary Carbon Markets reports

Allison Shapiro on May 29, 2009 Comment

Greetings from Carbon Expo! For the Ecosystem Marketplace Carbon Team, the "New Year" just began after the release of the 2009 State of the Voluntary Carbon Markets report and a couple of key carbon market conferences. After data collection from January through March, followed by analysis and writing in April and May, the report is launched in late May. Then, a wonderful thing happens: vacation!

In all seriousness, it's a rewarding but surprisingly difficult endeavor each year. Though we've got the data analysis down to a science, data collection is still like pulling teeth at times. Everyone wants to know how many credits passed hands, how much money was transacted, where the offsets are coming from, and why buyers are buying, but there are several dozen companies each year who will tell us everything BUT their transaction data... which is, of course, the most important information we collect. Through non-disclosure agreements and repeated assurances of the aggregation of the data in the report, this year we were able to get volume data from 75% of respondents.

The report is the brainchild of Ricardo and Kate, my fellow bloggers and the former and current managing directors of Ecosystem Marketplace, who recognized how crucial transparency was to the growth of this fragmented but important set of markets. So they began collecting data in 2007, soon realizing that this nebulous market with multiple non-regulatory drivers was actually growing at a really fast pace (doubling or tripling each year since 2006)-- faster than the global compliance markets, though only about 1-2% of their volume each year.

We've been thrilled with how the report has been taken up by the carbon market community and to have been able to shed light on trends in this marketplace whose impact on the world is greater than the sum of its transaction volumes. Another important aspect of this annual endeavor, to us, is that we're able to provide it for free, supplementing the treasure trove that is the World Bank's State and Trends of the Carbon Market report with detailed analysis on the unregulated markets.

Later this year, Ecosystem Marketplace will release the first annual reports on the other markets we cover--forest carbon, water, and biodiversity. In the meantime, you can check our Forest Carbon Portal (www.ForestCarbonPortal.com) and SpeciesBanking.com websites for market updates.