ICAO Releases List of Technical Advisory Board Members Who Will Recommend Eligible Offsets for CORSIA

(GreenAir Online) ICAO has released the list of members appointed to the Technical Advisory Body (TAB) that will assess emissions units programmes for eligibility under the UN agency’s Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA). The TAB, which will provide recommendations on eligibility to ICAO’s governing 36-State Council for decision, is made up of 19 members that the Council has agreed meet the required technical expertise and balanced geographical representation. Around 40 candidates had been nominated for membership by 34 countries. Among the members are two former chairmen of the UNFCCC’s CDM Executive Board and others with experience of carbon markets and UN negotiations. An early task of the TAB will be to discuss and provide recommendations on the vintage of eligible units.

The two former chairmen of the CDM Executive Board are Peer Stiansen of Norway and José Domingos Miguez of Brazil. The CDM Executive Board supervises the Kyoto Protocol’s clean development mechanism and the registration of projects and issuance of CDM CERs (Certified Emission Reductions).

Both Stiansen and Miguez have also represented their countries in UN climate change negotiations, as have Ulrika Raab (Sweden), Dimitar Nikov (France), Molly Peters-Stanley (United States) and Rajani Ranjan Rashmi (India). Others on the TAB are climate change or carbon market specialists from governments, research and academia.

Members are expected to serve a minimum of three years in accordance with each CORSIA compliance cycle and a Chairperson and Vice-Chairperson will be appointed who will hold their posts on a renewable one-year basis. It is possible that up to four new members could be added over time to the body if felt necessary by the Council.

The full list of TAB members, which is now posted on the ICAO CORSIA website, is as follows:

Excerpt from GreenAir Online: There are currently about two billion carbon offsets in circulation produced by the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). A large proportion of that volume has already been used for compliance purposes by governments and also companies, for example under the EU ETS. If the remaining units – and those to be generated by CDM projects in the future – are allowed under the scheme, their volume would far surpass demand for offsets by air carriers. On the flipside, restricting the amount of CDM units eligible under CORSIA to only those with high environmental integrity would severely limit offset supply. This analysis by Refinitiv highlights a few possible offset unit supply scenarios, each reflecting potential restrictions to CDM unit eligibility on the basis of the adopted offset criteria.

According to a recent assessment by Carbon Market Watch, the CDM fails to meet three of the 11 eligibility criteria set by the EUC (the full list of EUC criteria can be found here):

Consequently, the body in charge of the CDM may have to adjust the mechanism’s methodologies to correspond with all the EUC requirements. It is worth noting that none of the offset programmes reviewed by Carbon Market Watch met the criteria, meaning the lack of particular required characteristics is not just CDM-related but rather a general problem by that group’s assessment. Some of the criteria are impossible to meet at this stage, such as the requirement avoiding double counting, given that corresponding regulations under the Paris accord have not yet been finalised.

In this context, we provide our view on the potential CER use restrictions and correlating supply for CORSIA. We also look at these different supply scenarios with our baseline demand estimation, to highlight the role of the CDM in the overall CORSIA market balance. READ MORE