Brazil, which is already a major player in the $30 billion global trade in carbon credits, aims to hold its first online carbon credit auction this year on the São Paulo BM&F commodities and futures exchange in an initiative geared towards attracting European buyers. "We hope to reach an accord with one particular company interested in selling its credits via auction in the second half of the year," says Guilherme Magalhães Fagundes, the BM&F’s head of special projects. With a lack of liquidity in the world carbon credit market, daily trading is still some years away, but the BM&F says it aims to make the auction possible on the basis of buyer or seller demand and widen carbon credit sales away from the current business-to-business format.
The initiative might help Brazil and Latin America stop a slide in their share of the world’s carbon credit trade. In a market that tripled in value on 2005, Brazil accounted for 4% of traded Certified Emissions Reductions (CERs), which are established under the Kyoto Protocol and let developed countries buy into emissions-reducing projects in emerging markets to reduce their own carbon emissions by about 5% by 2012.