Africa-Press – Ghana. Accra, April 07, GNA-The Government is in the process of finalizing a National Framework of Carbon Market (Emission Trading), to govern the national process and institutional arrangements for approving eligible carbon market projects.
Already, a draft document on the framework, which was developed through the Ministry of Environment, Science, Technology and Innovation (MESTI), is going through stakeholder consultation.
Speaking to the Ghana News Agency, Dr Daniel Tutu Benefoh, Ghana’s Focal Person for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, said the draft framework would be finalised and forwarded to the cabinet for approval.
Ghana’s interest in Carbon Markets, he stated, was because the country was a low emitter of greenhouse gases and could take steps to future reduce gasses, attract the transfer of green technologies, and raise funds to achieve Nationally Determined Contributions.
The rules for a global carbon market were established at the recent Glasgow COP26 climate change conference, enacting an agreement first laid out in the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement.
He explained that the carbon market or emission trading, as set out in Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, allowed countries like Ghana that have emission units to spare – emissions permitted them but not “used” – to sell this excess capacity to countries such as Sweden that are over their targets.
Thus, a new commodity was created in the form of emission reductions or removals. Since carbon dioxide is the principal greenhouse gas, people speak simply of trading in carbon. Carbon is now tracked and traded like any other commodity.
Dr Benefoh said a carbon market office would be established to regulate and provide the needed support to the private sector to access regulatory services and enable them to participate fully in the market.
He noted that the office would be under the Ministry of Environment, Science and Technology and the Environmental Protection Agency. Ghana’s Focal Person hinted that the country was in the process of outdooring its first online registry system to be called the Ghana Carbon Registry, a voluntary registry.
It would serve as a base for collecting, verifying, and tracking emissions data from emissions reduction efforts and transactions at the project, programme, corporate or organization levels.
The carbon credits and the carbon trade are authorized by governments with the goal of gradually reducing overall carbon emissions and mitigating their contribution to climate change mitigation. Several countries and territories have started carbon trading programmes.
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