AirCarbon Exchange (ACX) has hosted the first trades of the newly launched Global Emission Reduction Contract, or GER, which aims to become the global reference price for voluntary carbon markets.
The contract, which was created by Net Zero Markets, went live on ACX on Friday, 17 June, and traded at between $7.23 a tonne to $7.60 a tonne with Bioeconomy, which is led by Dorjee Sun, a TIME Magazine Hero of the Environment, as one of the first buyers. Its current bid/ask range is $7.65-$7.70.
The GER has been designed to tackle some of the problems with existing voluntary carbon markets by providing a single price for carbon, akin to the standardisation and calibration provided by the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme for compliance markets. By combining the current mixture of standards, jurisdictions, project types and vintages into a single price, via four easy to understand sub-contracts that maintain price differentiation for harder to reach projects such as long-lived removals, the GER will help increase both liquidity and transparency in the often-opaque voluntary sector and make it much easier for corporates as well as small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to offset the carbon emissions they are unable to reduce.
