ABSTRACT
In nearly a decade since the signing of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, carbon trading has come to dominant popular thinking on climate change mitigation, even among many of the countries and organizations that originally opposed the idea. Yet while the European Union is busy with its own massive trading scheme, and organizations like the World Wildlife Fund now teach corporations how to trade carbon credits, opposition to trading is also growing, both intellectually as well as on the ground. This chapter will detail some of these struggles through an in-depth analysis of the development of the carbon market in South Africa. There are a number of reasons why South Africa is such a suitable candidate for this review. As the only African country with any serious Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) project development, the success or failure of the CDM in South Africa will have enormous implications for the carbon market on the rest of the continent. Secondly, with nearly two dozen projects in various stages of development, South Africa’s variety of methodologies and project developers is relatively representational of the global carbon market even though it has much fewer projects than some other countries.
