A global agtech software company plans to burst into the afforestation, reforestation, and revegetation (ARR) market, expecting to initiate 10 voluntary carbon projects this year after switching away from a REDD+ avoided deforestation approach, the founder and chief executive told Carbon Pulse this week.

A France-headquartered carbon crediting standard has received conditional endorsement from the International Carbon Reduction and Offset Alliance (ICROA).

The government of Spain has launched an EU-backed project seeking to restore more than 26,000 hectares of wetlands over the next decade, with an initial budget of €160.5 million.

After a first draft was submitted to public consultation last year, the European Commission on Tuesday published its final proposal to certify activities that permanently remove CO2 from the atmosphere, allowing first projects to be certified “in the coming months”.

Nature-based carbon projects often struggle to prove that they deliver real and measurable emissions reductions, according to recently published research that highlighted fundamental limits to causal attribution in complex social-ecological systems.

Indonesia is aiming to complete the launch of its national carbon market by late June, with large transactions expected to begin the following month, local media reported Tuesday.

A London-based carbon credit standard has introduced a pre-approval pathway for pyrolysers to streamline the validation of biochar projects and accelerate credit issuance, it announced Tuesday.

A UK-based conservation firm is raising capital to more than double its REDD+ project portfolio in Tanzania by 2035 and has launched a global learning platform focused on social impact in nature-based solutions (NbS), it announced last week.

A government body in Sweden is preparing to launch a SEK 300 million (€28 mln) funding call in March aimed at supporting bio-based carbon capture and storage (bio-CCS), it announced last week. 

The Global Carbon Council (GCC) and Malaysia Forest Fund (MFF) have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to strengthen cooperation on carbon markets and scale nature-based solutions across Malaysia, the organisations announced Tuesday.

Robust interest - Singapore’s Ministry of Trade and Industry told Carbon Pulse it received 52 submissions at the pre-qualification stage of its second request for proposals to procure Article 6-compliant carbon credits for use towards its 2030 climate target. The list includes major commodity and energy traders such as Shell, Trafigura, Vitol, Mercuria, and agribusiness groups Olam and Louis Dreyfus Company. MTI said the pre-qualification phase is expected to conclude around May of this year, when the second stage of the tender will begin. Further details on evaluation criteria will be released with the second-stage tender documents, it added. The tender, for both nature and tech-based carbon credits, is restricted to countries that have signed bilateral Implementation Agreements with the city-state.

JNR rating - The jurisdictional REDD+ (JNR) programme of Argentina’s Misiones province has received an A-AA rating from carbon ratings agency Sylvera, its developer Coralia Environmental announced Monday via LinkedIn. The assessment makes Misiones the first REDD+ project in Argentina to reach an A rating, only the second carbon project nationwide to do so, and the first with potential to attain AA status. Sylvera flagged only moderate risk levels across leakage, anthropogenic risk, and systems and safeguards categories, marking a step closer to the commercialisation of the world's first credits under Verra's JNR 2a scenario methodology.

Costa Rica became the latest Latin American country to elect a right-leaning president over the weekend, reinforcing a regional political shift that has left carbon pricing instruments suspended less by ideology than by questions of institutional capacity and revenue generation.