Carbon market integrity after Article 6: an early scorecard
The first bilateral carbon-trading agreements under the Paris Agreement's Article 6 framework are now operating. An early look at how their safeguards perform in practice.
Bilateral carbon-trading agreements authorised under Article 6.2 of the Paris Agreement began operating in 2023 and have expanded since. Each agreement is meant to include safeguards against double counting of emissions reductions.
Reviewing the public documentation for 11 agreements, we find corresponding-adjustment accounting is specified clearly in most cases, but reporting on project-level additionality — whether a reduction would have happened without the credit revenue — is inconsistent and, in several agreements, not yet published.
Where independent verification bodies are named in the agreement text, reporting has generally been more complete and arrived on a more predictable schedule than where verification is left to the host country alone.
The scorecard is not a judgement on any single country's programme; it is a comparison of what each agreement commits to disclose, set against what has actually been published to date.