Prospects For A Unified Ver Standard

According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s 2011 report, State of the Voluntary Carbon Market 2011, the VCS accounted for 34% of all carbon credits certified for the voluntary market throughout 2010. The next most common VER standard was the Climate, Community and Biodiversity Standard (CCB), with a 19% share of the market. The Climate Action Reserve VER Standard had a 16% share, followed by the Gold VER standard and the BMV VER standard with respectively 8% and 5% market share. The remaining 18% of the market was split between a variety of small VER standard accreditors.

Although each VER standard essentially has the same function, to independently verify that emission reduction and offsetting from projects awarded carbon credits is additional and accurately measured, their methodologies and additional criteria differ to a greater or lesser degree. Some standards, such as the VCS VER Standard and the Gold VER Standard, place greater emphasis on carbon accounting methodologies and have more stringent requirements in evaluating the additionality of the offsetting qualities of the projects they certify carbon credits from. As a result a VER standard bearing their accreditation is more costly and as a result they are more commonly used as accreditors by larger projects that can afford the procedures to qualify their offset projects as such.

Many of the smaller certifiers, such as the Social Carbon VER Standard and the Plan Vivo VER standard, are more focused on the social sustainability and biodiversity benefits of offset projects from which they certify carbon credits. They do not usually have the methodologies or resources to so stringently evaluate the carbon offsetting qualities of these projects. One result of this is that there have recently been several examples of carbon credits which have been jointly certified by a VER Standard such as the VCS or Gold Standard, in conjunction with one of the smaller standards. This is usually because a buyer has wanted to buy carbon credits associated with a particular project which is more social sustainability or ecologically orientated, but has required additional assurance in regard to the project’s offset additionality.

The obvious question is whether the logical progression of the voluntary carbon market isn’t an eventual unification of the numerous standards towards a single VER Standard? There VER standards are becoming more mainstream and there is a strong possibility that new compliance carbon markets, such as the Californian one, will adopt one of the existing VER Standard certification procedures rather than developing their own new methodology. If one or more of the more established VER standards becomes compatible with at least one major compliance markets the likelihood is that this will become the dominant VER standard.

By: Tonka Dobreva

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Over time this may lead to a single unified VER standard, or at least one clearly dominant standard.