The VCM or the voluntary carbon market was formed with the basic idea of driving finances into several types of activities that can help in reducing GHG or greenhouse gas emissions.
During the earlier days, the market was differentiated by gaining several types of modern approaches in order to fight emissions.
However, over the period of time, voluntary carbon offsetting has now matured and evolved into a completely effective and robust means to tackle carbon emissions with the help of different projects to driving resources which keeps on delivering independently verified emission reduction on a very big scale.
In addition to all these, the voluntary carbon market also helps in enabling companies to achieve great climate goals by further complementing the reduction in internal emissions.
Buying carbon offsets is a very important and indeed a necessary first step. By the end of the year 2019, the carbon-neutral market had already achieved roughly 608M tonnes of CO2 emission removals or reductions.
This number is equivalent to almost 131M cars taken off-road for almost a year.
Voluntary Carbon Market
When it comes to VCM, there are several participants who are actively involved in it.
Among all, the main participants of VCM includes all the consumer who actively purchase the offsets from providers including both international and domestic types of offset, then comes supplies including colleges, universities, governmental and NGOs, as well as several other third-party developers and verifiers of quality assurance programs.
Importance of carbon markets
The VCM is promoted as the best solution to reduce emissions that are affecting the whole world.
This is mainly caused by their effectiveness in economic empowerment and environmental protection. Here are some of the important benefits of carbon-neutral offsets.
- Great source of innovation and experimentation: The VCM is a great source of trying new experiments with new systems and technologies because they generally lack oversight, regulation, and bureaucracy existing in the regulated market. With the help of the VCM project, developers enjoy the overall freedom to implement projects that can be very small in nature or something which is even not viable for the compliance market.
- Helps in offering a platform in order to engage corporate goodwill: Several communities also get benefitted from the CSR activities of big brands that are engaged in VCM, storage, and even avoidance of greenhouse gases. This helps a lot in offering the potential to strengthen environmental policies while addressing the inequalities that are existing in between the poor and the rich.
- It further helps in the reduction of greenhouse emissions: The VCM helps in offering an opportunity that can help in reducing global greenhouse gases while addressing all the basic development needs of developing countries. Furthermore, allowing poor countries in the overall process of climate protection allows them to reduce carbon emissions while helping them to earn revenues by selling offsets.
In short, the increase in the amount of investment in VCM projects in order to reduce carbon footprint word wide can someday help us reach a zero-emission status.
