UN carbon market stuck in legal limbo

Following the postponement of Cop26, offset developers and investors must wait many months for uncertainty to be resolved

The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change’s (UNFCCC’s) carbon market is trapped in legal limbo, as countries have failed to reach agreement on whether it should be brought into the new global climate regime. Developers and investors around the world face almost a year of not knowing whether their clean-energy projects will earn the carbon offsets that they rely on to guarantee their viability. The problem stems from UN negotiators’ failure to reach consensus on a market mechanism to support the Paris Agreement. The 2015 treaty set out the broad principles of a global offset market that would help climate finance to flow to emerging and developing nations and assist them in bringing down