The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is a United Nations-run carbon offset scheme allowing countries to fund greenhouse gas emissions-reducing projects in other countries and claim the saved emissions as part of their own efforts to meet international emissions targets. It is one of the three Flexible Mechanisms defined in the Kyoto Protocol. The CDM, defined in Article 12 of the Protocol, was intended to meet two objectives: (1) to assist non-Annex I countries (predominantly developing nations) achieve sustainable development and reduce their carbon footprints; and (2) to assist Annex I countries (predominantly industrialized nations) in achieving compliance with their emissions reduction commitments (greenhouse gas emission caps).
The CDM addressed the second objective by allowing the Annex I countries to meet part of their emission reduction commitments under the Kyoto Protocol by buying Certified Emission Reduction units from CDM emission reduction projects in developing countries (Carbon Trust, 2009, p. 14). Both the projects and the issue of CERs units are subject to approval to ensure that these emission reductions are real and "additional." The CDM is supervised by the CDM Executive Board (CDM EB) under the guidance of the Conference of the Parties (COP/MOP) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Certified Emission Reduction units (CERs) are issued for successful projects, which may be traded in emissions trading schemes. The CDM allows industrialized countries to buy CERs and to invest in emission reductions where it is cheapest globally (Grubb, 2003, p. 159). Between 2001, which was the first year CDM projects could be registered and 7 September 2012, the CDM issued 1 billion Certified Emission Reduction units. As of 1 June 2013, 57% of all CERs had been issued for projects based on destroying either HFC-23 (38%) or N2O (19%). Carbon capture and storage (CCS) was included in the CDM carbon offsetting scheme in December 2011.
Because several countries with high emissions, including the United States and China, either were not signatories of the Kyoto Protocol or were not required by it to reduce their emissions, most of the market for CDMs came from European countries. This, together with the recessions brought on by the global financial crisis and the European debt crisis, resulted in very low demand for carbon offsets, causing the value of CEDs to plummet. In 2012, a UN-authorized report said governments urgently needed to address the future of the CDM and suggested the CDM was in danger of collapse. By that point, the value of a CERs had dropped to 5 USD per tonne of CO2 (from 20 USD in 2008); the following year the price abruptly crashed to less than 1 USD. As a result, thousands of projects were left with unclaimed credits. The struggle about what to do with the old credits was a major cause for the perceived failure of the 2019 United Nations Climate Change Conference.
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