Japan sees big firms trading CO2 next year

Japan is looking to over 1,000 companies, including big firms, to join in a local over-the-counter market for carbon offsets that is being launched to spur voluntary efforts to cut emissions, a government official said.

"We're expecting major companies which currently take part in the voluntary action plan to join in," Yasuo Takahashi, director at Ministry of the Environment's office of market mechanisms, said in an interview for Reuters' global environment summit.

Japan will start later this month to accept applications from companies joining in the new market, which will be floated on a trial basis.

Emissions data in the year to next March will be available around next August, so trading may start after that, with assessment of CO2 surpluses or deficits based on a company's existing voluntary emissions target.

In the trial market, a company's target limits either the total volume of energy-origin carbon dioxide it emits or the amount of CO2 per unit of production.

The latter allows a company's emissions to rise along with economic growth as long as energy efficiency improves as much as pledged to the government, showing a stark contrast to the European Union's cap-and-trade emissions trading scheme.

In Japan, industries under the nation's biggest business lobby, the Japan Business Federation (Keidanren), set their own CO2 targets, which became the basis of the government's commitments under the Kyoto Protocol.

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Source: Reuters