Coffee with: Kishor Rajhansa, Chief Operations Officer of the Global Carbon Council: Kishor Rajhansa (LinkedIn) serves as the chief operations officer of the Global Carbon Council (GCC). Prior to his appointment as COO, he served as the technical and strategy director of the GCC and the Carbon and Climate Action Executive Director of the Gulf Organization for Research & Development. He is also a member of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) Methodologies Panel.

Enterprise Climate sat down with Rajhansa to discuss the credits GCC offers, projects in the pipeline, expansion plans, partnerships with MENA’s private and public sectors, and what GCC’s involvement in COP28 will look like.

Edited excerpts of our conversation follow:

Enterprise: Tell us a bit about the idea behind establishing GCC.

Kishor Rajhansa: The MENA region remained underrepresented in the carbon markets and we wanted to launch a platform that would adequately give the global south access to verifiable carbon credits to help the region reach its climate targets. We spent three years in the interim between launching GCC and kicking off operations accumulating some 1.5k projects in 42 countries that could generate carbon credits.

We were initially focused on the MENA region, but since our launch, we have obtained certifications from organizations like the Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Civil Aviation Organization, expanding our reach globally.

E: How does it work?

KR: These 1.5k projects will reduce emissions in 10 years’ time and our crediting period for each project is 10 years. The crediting system entails a period of 10 years for the energy ventures for which we issue credits. The energy projects we back — with the exception of renewable energy assets — will enable us to issue some 2 bn carbon credits over a 10-year period. We have received proposals to issue credits for a variety of projects from the MENA region including micro and large scale renewables projects, waste management ventures, and biofuels.

E: Are there specific selection criteria and exceptions for projects?

KR: As one of the few voluntary carbon markets in the global south, we understand the developing world faces unique challenges which hinders comparable adoption of net zero energy sources compared to the western hemisphere, so we do allow for projects associated with methane generation. We do not allow nuclear energy projects, however, because they are hazardous and require unique evaluation and regulation standards. The projects we issue credits for are compliant with the UNFCCC’s 16 sector scopes.

E: Does GCC have expansion plans in the pipeline?

KR: We are currently working on partnering with new stock exchanges and aim to issue our credits in Saudi Arabia, the Abu Dhabi Global Market, and India. We are also developing methodologies for the issuance of carbon credits from a variety of new sectors including the building sector, waste management, direct air capture, and carbon capture — which is particularly useful in MENA. We will use our methodologies to connect governments with each other under the Paris Agreement’s Article 6.2 — which allows for the trade and transfer of emission reductions — in order to push the region’s climate action forward and establish the GCC as a regional carbon market.

E: Is a certain MENA country that excels at carbon reduction efforts from the GCC’s standpoint?

KR: The UAE holds the lion’s share of the region’s contribution to emissions reduction, with Egypt following closely behind in terms of projects submitted to us for evaluation. Saudi Arabia is next, with Oman and Qatar rounding out the top five contributors.

E: There’s been a lot of talk about how carbon offsetting helps corporations greenwash theiroperations without actually compensating for their emissions given a lack of global checks and balances. What are your thoughts on that point of view?

KR: Carbon offsets play a vital role in the path to carbon neutrality, and VCMs bring economic value while doing so. However, I completely agree that companies must do their part fully and not heavily rely on carbon credits: They must work to slash their carbon footprint and only compensate unavoidable emissions through carbon offsets.

Renewable energy projects are a great path to carbon-neutrality with 84% of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) relying on them for decarbonization. Critics think that the overall expenses associated with renewable energy are falling, however it must be noted tariffs are also falling by greater proportions. For example, the cost of green technologies such as solar panels fell almost 5x in the last decade in some Indian provinces, but the tariff which is paid by these provinces to renewable energy developers also plummeted by 7-8x, leaving the developer’s return on investment affected.

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