Publication: Country Guidance for Navigating Carbon Markets
Loading...
Files
2,922 downloads
398 downloads
218 downloads
193 downloads
230 downloads
101 downloads
102 downloads
81 downloads
91 downloads
170 downloads
Published
2025-06-06
ISSN
Date
2025-05-30
Editor(s)
Abstract
As a follow-up to the "Navigating Decisions in Carbon Markets" framework, this Guidance Document helps host countries develop a strategic approach for engaging with international carbon markets. It is structured into seven modules and is designed to help countries explore and answer fundamental questions on their participation in international carbon markets. It aims to help countries unlock the potential these markets offer to mobilize financing to support climate and wider developmental objectives, while managing risks. It identifies options, evaluates their strengths and weaknesses, and supports informed decision making.
The Guidance also aims to address fragmentation in the capacity building landscape and was co-developed with the Paris Agreement Article 6 Implementation Partnership (A6IP), the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI), the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and the Voluntary Carbon Markets Integrity Initiative (VCMI).
Link to Data Set
Citation
“World Bank; A6IP; GGGI; GIZ; ICVCM; UNDP; UNFCCC; VCMI. 2025. Country Guidance for Navigating Carbon Markets. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/43263 License: CC BY-NC 3.0 IGO.”
Digital Object Identifier
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication State and Trends of Carbon Pricing 2021(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2021-05-25)This report provides an up-to-date overview of existing and emerging carbon pricing instruments around the world, including international, national and subnational initiatives. It also investigates trends surrounding the development and implementation of carbon pricing instruments and how they could accelerate the delivery of long-term mitigation goals. Specifically, this includes the use of carbon taxes, emissions trading systems and crediting mechanisms. International cooperation on carbon pricing and the status of work surrounding Article 6 of the Paris Agreement is also canvassed.Publication State and Trends of Carbon Pricing 2025(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-06-10)This report provides an up-to-date overview of existing and emerging carbon pricing instruments around the world, including international, national and subnational initiatives. It also investigates trends surrounding the development and implementation of carbon pricing instruments. Specifically, this includes the use of carbon taxes, emissions trading systems and crediting mechanisms.Publication State and Trends of Carbon Pricing 2020(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2020-05-27)This report provides an up-to-date overview of existing and emerging carbon pricing instruments around the world, including international, national and subnational initiatives. It also investigates trends surrounding the development and implementation of carbon pricing instruments and how they could accelerate the delivery of long-term mitigation goals. Specifically, this includes the use of carbon taxes, emissions trading systems and crediting mechanisms. International cooperation on carbon pricing and the status of work surrounding Article 6 of the Paris Agreement is also canvassed.Publication State and Trends of Carbon Pricing 2016(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2016-10)This report provides an up-to-date overview of existing and emerging carbon pricing instruments around the world, including national and subnational initiatives. Furthermore, it gives an overview of current corporate carbon pricing initiatives. Another key focus of the report is on the importance of aligning carbon pricing with the broader policy landscape. The analysis provides lessons for policymakers on how maximize synergies between climate mitigation and other related policies, while managing potential tensions and tradeoffs. It also provides new modelling analysis to demonstrate the crucial benefits that an international carbon market established under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement could provide in reducing the costs to countries of achieving their emission reduction targets. An international carbon market could thus enable greater ambition in taking steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to a level consistent with the 2°C climate stabilization goal.Publication Carbon Markets Under the Kyoto Protocol(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-12-19)This working paper commissioned by the World Bank Carbon Markets and Innovation Practice (GCCMI) critically examines experience with carbon markets under the Kyoto protocol. The de facto end of the Kyoto Protocol and heralding of the Paris Agreement era has created the space for critical evaluation of trading carbon assets. The Kyoto Protocol and Paris Agreement diverge markedly in scope, centralization, and logic. As a result, the Article 6 carbon market mechanisms that emerge under Paris are likely to be very different to those that emerged under Kyoto. Nonetheless, experience with carbon markets under the Kyoto Protocol remains informative. This paper argues that there is still an economic and political rationale for trading carbon assets across borders. Trade in carbon assets can help reduce the costs of mitigation and facilitate emissions abatement at least-cost locations. When designed well, carbon market mechanisms can also facilitate learning, mobilize the private sector, and encourage transparency of mitigation efforts. Crucially, carbon markets could help support the operating logic of the Paris Agreement by binding signatories together and enhancing collective ambition. However, done badly, linking emissions systems could entail some risks to environmental integrity. In addition, given continued delays to the clarification of Article 6 and the need for strong action now, countries should not wait to implement effective domestic mitigation instruments such as carbon.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication Unlocking Electric Mobility Potential in MENA(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-10-17)There is an urgency to scale up the electrification of transport amongst the worldwide efforts towards energy transition and decarbonization. Electric mobility, or e-mobility, has become one of the rapidly developing opportunities to contribute to nations’ climate and development goals, including climate change mitigation, fiscal burden reduction (for oil importing economies), energy efficiency, sustainability, air quality improvement, and promoting modal shift where applicable (e.g. expanding access to electrified public transport). For a region featuring diverse urban settings like the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), different local circumstances lead to different rationales for adopting various modalities of e-mobility. Considering relatively little attention being paid to public transport electrification in MENA, this study, “Unlocking Electric Mobility Potential in MENA” funded by the ESMAP, MOLO and PPIAF trust funds, set out to examine the opportunities and challenges and finding solutions to help address this gap.Publication Shrinking Economic Distance(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-09-19)Despite the reduction in transport costs over the past few decades, creating a single integrated economy remains elusive. Low- and middle-income countries face higher transport prices than high-income countries for both international and domestic shipments, and shipping times are longer and less reliable. Tackling the problem can increase income and general welfare in low- and middle-income countries, improving the lives of the people who live there. “Shrinking Economic Distance: Understanding How Markets and Places Can Lower Transport Costs in Developing Countries” makes a unique contribution by assessing the main determinants of shippers’ economic costs of freight transport—economic distance—and identifying the frictions that keep transport prices above an efficient level, shipping times high, and reliability low. Drawing on new analyses and compiling many others, the book provides important evidence to inform the design of policies to reduce the economic costs of transport and deepen the economic integration of developing countries. This book shows how understanding the frictions driving the economic costs of freight transport can help policy makers target reforms in the areas in which they can have the greatest impact and avoid unintended consequences. It lays out the building blocks for a reform agenda to reduce economic distance, which includes first making markets and then making places efficient. “Shrinking Economic Distance” will be of enormous value to policy makers, practitioners, and academics interested in freight transport and economic integration.Publication Market Structure and Efficiency in Agricultural Value Chains(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-07-09)Hunger and malnutrition remain critical developmental challenges in Central America. Since 2020, rates of moderate and severe food insecurity have risen across the region, while key indicators in early childhood nutrition persist at high levels across both lower- and upper-middle-income states. Rising food prices play a key role in limiting access to healthy and affordable diets for the populations of these countries. In 2022 and 2023, food price inflation reached or exceeded 10 percent in Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Across almost all of these countries, white maize prices remain more than 40 percent higher than their levels in 2021, while prices for red and black beans rose by 40 percent to 90 percent over the same period. These price increases have disproportionately affected poorer and rural households. This report represents a context-specific approach to analyzing market structures and dynamics that may contribute to price distortions in two country-commodity pairs in Central America: white maize in El Salvador, and bananas in then Dominican Republic.Publication Public Expenditure Review for Wildfire Management(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-07-14)Wildfires pose significant environmental and socioeconomic challenges, necessitating efficient management and prevention through proper resource allocation and financial oversight. Despite evidence on risks, drivers, and opportunity costs of intervention, there is little information on how countries’ policies and practices are evolving with increased wildfire risk, particularly regarding additional investments needed to strengthen response and prevention and risk reduction capacities. To address this gap, the World Bank has developed this guide to wildfire management public expenditure review to help governments and relevant agencies review their wildfire management expenditures, align spending with strategic goals, and enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of funding usage.Publication World Development Report 2008(Washington, DC, 2007)The world's demand for food is expected to double within the next 50 years, while the natural resources that sustain agriculture will become increasingly scarce, degraded, and vulnerable to the effects of climate change. In many poor countries, agriculture accounts for at least 40 percent of GDP and 80 percent of employment. At the same time, about 70 percent of the world's poor live in rural areas and most depend on agriculture for their livelihoods. World Development Report 2008 seeks to assess where, when, and how agriculture can be an effective instrument for economic development, especially development that favors the poor. It examines several broad questions: How has agriculture changed in developing countries in the past 20 years? What are the important new challenges and opportunities for agriculture? Which new sources of agricultural growth can be captured cost effectively in particular in poor countries with large agricultural sectors as in Africa? How can agricultural growth be made more effective for poverty reduction? How can governments facilitate the transition of large populations out of agriculture, without simply transferring the burden of rural poverty to urban areas? How can the natural resource endowment for agriculture be protected? How can agriculture's negative environmental effects be contained? This year's report marks the 30th year the World Bank has been publishing the World Development Report.