PhD seminar – Tara L’HORTY

The global Voluntary Carbon Market (VCM) comprises a diverse range of carbon credits, of heterogeneous quality and purchased by a broad spectrum of buyers.  Our paper aims to shed light on buyers preferences for voluntary carbon credits (VCCs). The level of retirements of carbon offsetting projects is used to capture the cross-sectional variation of buyers’ willingness-to-claim certificates associated with project attributes and context characteristics. For this, it is estimated a random-effect tobit model for panel data on a subset of the Voluntary Registry Offsets Database in the period from 2010 to 2023. Key findings include heightened preferences for projects certified by Gold Standard over other standards, the greater attractiveness of chemical and industrial projects, the preference for projects in regions with lower human development indices and higher Rule of law. Further data is needed to establish correlations with project additionality and the impact of storytelling marketing strategies.

 

Her paper will be commented Serge Garcia (Research director, BETA, INRAE) and Mehdi Guelmamen (PhD student, BETA, UL).