World carbon market seen doubling this year: IETA

By Annika Breidthardt

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Carbon emissions trading will probably double to at least $60 billion this year, the head of an industry body said on Monday, as investors and polluters seek to profit from reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

"I would put it in (that) ballpark," Andrei Marcu, president of the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA) told reporters ahead of a conference on the carbon market.

The majority of that market value continues to come from the European Union's Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), said Evan Ard, director of brokerage Evolution Markets Inc, but trading outside of the system was catching up.

"One key trend you will see for 2007 is that the credit market will be taking up an even larger percentage of the total market but you'll still see the dominant single market being the European market," Ard said, though he did not give figures.

One credit -- officially known as a certified emissions reduction (CER) -- represents the reduction of one tonne of carbon dioxide emissions under any scheme certified by Kyoto's clean development mechanism (CDM).

The scheme allows rich nation polluters to fund emissions cuts in developing countries -- usually cheaper than cutting emissions at home -- and put them towards domestic quotas.

CERs currently trade around 17 euros per tonne.

More and more companies want a piece of the cake, including brokers, carbon buyers -- such as Trading Emissions Plc -- and carbon project developers that actually take stakes in projects, like EcoSecurities.