Latin America could become a model of low-carbon development – if it can beef up local expertise and speed up development of carbon offset projects.  The Santiago Climate Exchange and the Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) are working together to do just that.

The global carbon markets began quietly in the late 1980s as part of a voluntary effort to save rainforests, but these small, voluntary efforts were quickly eclipsed – and often dismissed – when the Kyoto Protocol ushered in compliance markets a decade later.  Now, however, it’s the compliance markets that are turning to the voluntary markets for guidance as regulators and voluntary market players rush to meet halfway.

China generates the lion’s share of global offsets under the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), but it doesn't cap its own emissions. It does, however, have its own voluntary carbon standard – the “Panda Standard” – which was unveiled at last year's Climate-Change Conference in Copenhagen and is designed to drive domestic demand for forestry and poverty alleviation with a vehicle that is uniquely Chinese.

Tackling tropical deforestation can put a huge dent in global carbon emissions, but also requires a big pool of money to make forests more valuable alive than dead. Forest projects seeking carbon credits received a boon this week as a major standard provider announced its first benchmark to quantify the climate benefits of tropical forest conservation. Southeast Asia’s carbon-rich peat forests are first on the list.