Planned Zimbabwe carbon registry throws Belarus plan into doubt

A carbon registry and exchange that planned to launch in Zimbabwe next month has thrown the fate of two million Russian offsets that a Belarusian trade associate said it would list on the exchange into doubt.

The Africa Voluntary Carbon Credits Market will only trade offsets originating on the continent, it said in a statement. At a conference this month former South African President Jacob Zuma, representing the Belarus African Foreign Trade Association, BAFTA, announced that credits secured by the association would kick-start trade on the bourse. Belarusian government officials later confirmed those credits were from a Siberian forestry project.

The exchange will “only trade on its platform carbon credits coming from countries in the African continent and not any other jurisdiction,” Kwanele Hlabangana, AVCCM’s chairman, said in a statement on Tuesday. He didn’t refer Zuma’s announcement other than to say foreign media had “sought to draw our organisation into geopolitical issues.”

BAFTA respects AVCCM’s “commercial decision,” an official from Belarus’s National Agency of Investment and Privatisation said in response to a query. “Our pledge and intent when it comes to Zimbabwe still remains.”

A carbon credit represents a ton of climate-warming carbon dioxide or its equivalent either removed from the atmosphere or prevented from entering it in the first place. They are bought by emitters of greenhouse gases to offset their activities.-ebusinessweekly