Source: Blue Carbon Is One of Many Companies Inking Carbon Market Deals – The New York Times
Dec. 16, 2023
First, the little-known Emirati company set its sights on a forest the size of Maine. Then, another one that was big as South Carolina. After that, it focused on a chunk of land the size of Puerto Rico.
As the oil-rich emirate of Dubai prepared to host this year’s United Nations-sponsored climate summit, the company, named Blue Carbon and founded by a prince, was accumulating proposed deals on huge swaths of land across the developing world. It sought to position itself as a force for a purported solution to global warming: carbon credits.
Carbon credits are potentially one of the most important — but also most controversial — tools to speed up efforts to reduce global emissions of heat-trapping gases. The idea is simple: each credit is worth one ton of carbon dioxide emissions that was sequestered or avoided.
In theory, the carbon trade could increase the ambition of industrialized nations by letting them reduce emissions in other countries while figuring out how to do it home. It could also direct funds to developing countries that badly need them to grow their economies sustainably.
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