The carbon credit market is struggling to develop

While strategy consultancy McKinsey predicted in January 2021 that the carbon credit market would be worth $50 billion by 2030, the value of transactions, which had reached $2.1 billion in 2021, fell back to $1.4 billion in 2023. A number of scandals (Brazil's energy minister recently warned of possible links between certain segments of the carbon credit market and mafia groups) and the tendency of some carbon credit sellers to systematically overvalue the emissions avoided by the projects issuing the credits have led many companies to turn away from this market. There are, however, initiatives aimed at cleaning up the market by reserving the allocation of credits for projects that remove CO2 from the atmosphere as opposed to projects that avoid emissions, since estimating the emissions avoided is in practice much more difficult.