California’s carbon market regulators issued 4.86 million offsets in the past fortnight, the most ever handed out over a two-week period and increasing existing supply by 20%, according to data published Wednesday by the Air Resources Board.

More offsets were issued over the past fortnight than the amount awarded over the previous four months, bringing the total number of units handed out to date to 29.35 million.

The vast majority of the newly-issued offsets, some 4.45 million, were handed to the White Mountain Apache Tribe forestry compliance project, which has an eight-year invalidation timeframe that started in Jul. 2014.

White Mountain is a 89,804 acre improved forest management initiative project in Arizona.

Some 626,793 of the credits were deposited into a forest buffer account, which provides insurance against reversals of GHG reductions due to unintentional causes, for example forest fires, pest infestations, or disease outbreaks.

A further 199,000 units were doled out to two early action initiatives that capped ozone-depleting substances (ODS), operated by EOS Climate Inc.

Some 130,722 went to early action forest projects, while the remaining 81,067 was dished out to early action livestock installations.

Those issuances chipped away at ARB’s early action offset backlog, which was agency must approve by a mandated August 2016 deadline.

ARB also republished guidelines on converting early action offsets – issued by approved programmes including the American Carbon Registry, Climate Action Reserve, and Verified Carbon Standard – into ARB offsets.

The guidelines appeared specifically geared towards rice cultivation projects, which as a new methodology was approved earlier this year.

By Mike Szabo – mike@carbon-pulse.com