1 Mart 2006Planetark
"The growth and speed in the carbon market has been quite extraordinary," said Oslo-based analysts Point Carbon, the report's author, in a statement.
Total trade in carbon dioxide (CO2), the main traded greenhouse gas, was worth 9.4 billion euros, with dealing volumes surging eightfold to 799 million tones, the report said.
Despite the massive growth, CO2 markets are still dwarfed by mature commodity markets like crude oil which is worth trillions of dollars a year.
The surge in CO2 trade came in the year that Europe officially launched its emissions trading scheme - the world's first international emissions market - as the mainstay of its effort to meet Kyoto Protocol targets.
The European scheme formed the biggest segment of the global market in value terms (7.2 billion euros).
But volumes were highest in the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), a Kyoto Protocol scheme which allows rich countries to earn low-cost credits through investments in foreign markets like China and India.
In Europe, 5.4 billion euros of trade was done via brokers and exchanges, with 79 percent of that total going through brokers. Among several CO2 exchanges which have sprung up in Europe, the European Climate Exchange dominates, according to Point Carbon.
