Together with the priority of far-reaching decarbonisation, the United Nations highlights the fact that, to achieve the goal of keeping the temperature increase below 1.5°C, we also need to increase the removal of carbon from the atmosphere and guarantee the protection and restoration of nature. However, current policies are not bringing us closer to this goal and there is a significant funding gap for innovation and for scaling up the necessary solutions.

This is the case with many nature-based solutions, such as conserving and restoring forests, which play an essential role in reducing and removing emissions but are insufficiently funded. The United Nations has estimated that the funds spent on these solutions must double by 2025 and triple by 2030 to meet global climate and biodiversity goals.

In this context, carbon credit markets constitute an essential component of climate policy, mobilising, at speed and scale, the urgently needed public and private funding. The income from selling credits allows the development of a wide range of projects that contribute to global mitigation but would otherwise be uneconomic and could not be funded.

For a project to generate credits, it must be registered and certified with a recognised standard that guarantees its quality and prevents double accounting. Once issued, they can pass through several intermediaries before being finally withdrawn from the market by the final buyer, who can claim the underlying result towards achieving their own climate goals. De esta manera, permite a las empresas utilizarlos como complemento en el marco de estrategias ambiciosas de descarbonización alineadas con la ciencia, para neutralizar sus emisiones residuales o financiar mitigación climática adicionalIn this way, companies can use them as an additional tool within the framework of ambitious science-based decarbonisation strategies to neutralise their residual emissions or fund additional climate mitigation.

Driven by net zero emissions targets, the voluntary carbon market is maturing and consolidating. There are important dynamics of change marked by new players entering the market and the establishment of a new quality framework, with promising, regulations, initiatives and technologies that help generate trust in the market and in the legitimate use of credits in ambitious decarbonisation strategies.