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Carbon market rescue

Nature Climate Change volume 5, pages 297–299 (2015)Cite this article

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Reform of carbon trading in Europe could help claw back its credibility as an instrument to cut emissions. Sonja van Renssen reports.

The European Union Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) was and still is plugged as Europe's 'main instrument' to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Yet many will tell you that it has played anything but a major role in that task over the past decade: instead, the economic crisis, and renewables and energy-efficiency policies explain the nearly 20% cut in EU emissions compared with 1990 levels. Today, the EU ETS is looking to reinvent itself. Carbon trading is far from dead, not least because the European experiment has inspired myriad other trading schemes around the world1.

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Figure 1: Current status of ETSs worldwide.

References

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  1. Sonja van Renssen is a freelance journalist based in Brussels, Belgium,

    Sonja van Renssen

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  1. Sonja van Renssen
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Correspondence to Sonja van Renssen.

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van Renssen, S. Carbon market rescue. Nature Clim Change 5, 297–299 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2588

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