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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - CARBOMART (Trading Platform for Sustainable Carbon Credits)

Teaser

Summary

CARBOMART, www.carbomart.com, is an online carbon trading platform- which brings together carbon credit buyers and carbon credit sellers.
Environment-friendly green project investors, who would like to obtain carbon credits (i.e. VER credits), should develop their projects according to the sustainability rules set by United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and International NGOs. These sustainability criteria determine the social, environmental and economic contribution of the project to the certain indicators like women employment, biodiversity, transfer of new technology, etc. However, in the VER market, these sustainability criteria are ignored, and only supply-demand factor is used for determining the price of carbon credit. Moreover, carbon credit buyers cannot directly reach the carbon credit sellers and/or does not have enough knowledge to evaluate the emission reduction projects in terms of their social responsibility and marketing activities. Therefore, the broker companies facilitate the evaluation of the projects and transactions between the carbon credit buyers and sellers. However, brokerage commission fees (rates) of these broker companies are much higher than the sales price of project developers/owners. Thus, most of the funds raised from the sales of the carbon credits are taken by broker companies though the main target of VER market is to promote emission reduction project owners and to disseminate the investments on clean energy production, energy efficiency and afforestation-reforestation projects.

CARBOMART allows the carbon credit buyers to evaluate the carbon emission reduction projects by performing line by line project comparison according to the social, environmental and economic sustainability criteria. Moreover, the buyers will be able to directly access the emission reduction projects with their sales prices directly set by the project developers/owners (sellers). This will allow both buyers and sellers to get reference carbon credit prices and reference sustainability benchmarks for the emission reduction projects.
The general objectives being targeted through CARBOMART are;
1) Developing a measurable pricing methodology for the Voluntary Carbon Market
2) Creating an accessible platform for both buyers and sellers
3) Developing a reliable sustainability comparison tool for the voluntary emission reduction projects,

Work performed

In scope of this feasibility study;
- Firstly, a market study was carried to understand the factors that affect the carbon credit buyersâ€™ decisions while accomplishing their purchases in order to configure/design accordingly the CARBOMARTâ€™s exchange (Payment vs. Carbon Credits) mechanisms accordingly.
- Secondly, engagement of the potential users was provided. According to the feedbacks from the potential users the sustainability comparison tool of the CARBOMART will be revised and it will become more balanced in terms of knowledge and complexity.
- Thirdly, the ways to obtain carbon stock data from carbon registries has been searched and process flow of the CARBOMART has been revised.
- Additionally, Financial Risk Assessment has been analysed in further detail, including costs, revenue, operational expenses, cash flow and profit margin in different market situations for different scenarios and our preliminary financial assumptions has been verified.
- Finally, a detailed IP study has been carried out. Options for the IP and brand protection were listed.

Final results

In line with the objectives of the CARBOMART, the expected impacts are;

â€¢ Facilitating the transparency voluntary carbon market.
â€¢ Increase in the quality of voluntary emission reduction projects in terms of sustainability,
â€¢ Increasing the investment made in carbon emission reduction projects, therefore, decreasing the emission reductions up to 5% since the effects of the carbon credit income to the IRR of a green energy investment are around 5%.