EcoSecurities Wants CDM Board With Market Experience

Typography
SINGAPORE - EcoSecurities Group wants to have bureaucratic regulators replaced in the United Nations-administered carbon trading scheme, the carbon cutting project developer said on Wednesday, a day after cutting its profit forecasts due to delays in that scheme.

SINGAPORE - EcoSecurities Group wants to have bureaucratic regulators replaced in the United Nations-administered carbon trading scheme, the carbon cutting project developer said on Wednesday, a day after cutting its profit forecasts due to delays in that scheme.

"We would like to see a CDM executive board that is populated with more people with direct market regulatory experience, financial regulators, utility regulators, people with direct experience," Marc Stuart, EcoSecurities co-founder and director of new business development told Reuters.

"With all due respect, these guys are generally negotiators that have been put in there and they are responsible for $40 to $50 billion of created value over the next few years. Understanding what is material and what is not is not necessarily one of their strong points," he added.

The UK-based company on Tuesday blamed bureaucratic delays in the U.N.-administered carbon trading scheme, the clean development mechanism (CDM), when it warned investors that revenues and profits would miss expectations and cut its carbon offset pipeline by a fifth.

Stuart also said the regulatory board should begin to trust the opinions of designated operational entities (DOEs), who validate projects for approval, and that communication with applicants needed to be improved.

Carbon offset trading under the Kyoto Protocol's CDM was worth $5 billion last year, part of a global carbon market that is worth at least $60 billion this year.

!ADVERTISEMENT 

(Reporting by Annika Breidthardt, Editing by Ramthan Hussain)