July 2021 - On 31 May 2021, UNEP DTU Partnership, Perspectives Climate Research together with First Climate hosted an international workshop to discuss interim results of the research project "Transformation and Article 6". The project, funded by the German Environment Agency (UBA), explores how transformational change can be fostered through Article 6 activities. Government representatives, market participants and researchers from all around the world took part in the virtual seminar and discussed both challenges and opportunities of using Article 6.
The first series of discussions focused on the concept of transformational change as such and dealt with the question of how to measure the environmental impact of an activity. Participants also discussed a variety of options for promoting transformational change, for example through regulatory or financial incentives at national or international level. Case studies from Morocco, Costa Rica and Pakistan, showed among other things that safeguards against negative impacts of projects on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) do not yet play a pronounced role. The third part of the event dealt with additionality, dynamic baselines, and the promotion of sustainable development as well as safeguarding of planetary boundaries.
There was broad agreement among the participants that carbon markets under Article 6 are in principle among the tools that can be used to accelerate transformational change and enable NDC ambition raising. Given the significant time constraints and the lack of uniform rules for Article 6, it is important to gain experience in pilot activities that demonstrate how carbon markets can contribute to the necessary transformation. Participants underlined that the implementation of some options, such as moving towards dynamic baselines through the application of an “ambition coefficient”, will be challenging. It also became clear that a transformational impact is more likely to be achieved through upscaled mitigation activities. Overall, the discussions showed that those options that are meant to trigger transformational change also need to align with the evolution of the long-term global carbon market landscape and architecture, as more projects will emerge in the future that remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere thanks to natural and technical approaches.
The documentation of the webinar and the presentations are now available for download.