Wednesday, 26 June 2024.
As anticipated about a month ago, UNIDROIT’s Working Group on the Legal Nature of Voluntary Carbon Credits convened for its the second meeting.
Today we will go briefly over its just released Summary Report, the meeting minutes.
It caught our attention the fact that “the Working Group agreed to change the project title from “The Legal Nature of Voluntary Carbon Credits” to “The Legal Nature of Verified Carbon Credits”.” (after an interesting discussion, as you will see …)
The relationship of UNCITRAL and UNIDROIT is also explained in the report, after the issuance of their “Joint Study on the Legal Nature of Verified Carbon Credits Issued by Independent Carbon Standard Setters”, also covered by us.
Another interesting and apparent point of convergence was the appointment of a professor of law from the University of Tokyo as the Chair of the Working Group. The so-called “Paris Agreement Article 6 Implementation Partnership” is also under the lead of the Ministry of the Environment from Japan, like you have been reading in our posts. Carbon Credit Markets is a member of that partnership.
The report also includes transcriptions of presentations of two carbon standard setters and registries, Verra and Puro Earth. Inter alia, they addressed how verified carbon credits were issued, evidenced, individualised, transferred, encumbered, retired or otherwise cancelled.
Click below to download the document.
We suggest that when reading the minutes, search for the word “Conclusion”. There are 14 occurrences in the 42 pages document. After most of them, you go straight to the summary of each decision by the Working Group.
The meeting was attended by 9 members and 32 observers and Annex II nominates them. Also give a look, should you be interested on how your jurisdiction is being represented in these decisions of real global impact.
Last but not least, it never hurts to remember how many legal system exist in the World, like Civil Law, Common Law and several others. If interested in seeing per country, here is a thorough list by the CIA Factbook.
