The legal basis for transferring emission reductions between states, whose decisive contribution is the rule forbidding one tonne to be counted twice.
Article 6 organizes cooperation between states in meeting their national contributions, through bilateral transfers of mitigation outcomes and through a centralized mechanism succeeding the Kyoto Protocol's clean development mechanism. Its decisive contribution is not creating a market, which the earlier protocol already did, but imposing the corresponding adjustment: when a country transfers a reduction it must subtract it from its own inventory, which forbids the same tonne serving twice. That accounting rule is what separates a credible market from generalized double counting, and it is what deadlocked negotiations for six years. For voluntary credits bought by companies, Article 6 has an indirect but considerable effect: a credit from a country that makes no adjustment remains counted in that country's inventory, so the buyer cannot claim exclusivity over it, a distinction carbon neutrality claims long ignored and that advertising regulators now penalize.
The implementing rules for Article 6, left open since 2015, were settled at the twenty-sixth Conference of the Parties held in Glasgow in November 2021, in particular the corresponding adjustment principle designed to prevent double counting of transferred reductions.
article 6, coopération internationale climat, ITMO, résultats d'atténuation transférés