There is a renewed sense of optimism around tackling climate change – the international community must harness this momentum and scale-up efforts to protect and restore tropical forests. A coalition of private and public sector partners have launched the Green Gigaton Challenge, which aims to mobilize funds to achieve its target of one gigaton of high-quality emissions reductions, per year, by 2025.

The Paris Agreement is designed to create a “race to the bottom” in emissions, with countries proposing ever-deeper emission reductions in their Climate Action Plans. To avoid disaster, they’ll have to be 55 percent deeper by 2030 than they were when the Paris Agreement was signed. So far, they’re less than 3 percent deeper.

Controlling realities through accounting is an illusion. It is essential to create multiple incentives for mitigation, including through voluntary carbon markets. While corporate action is essential, only truly additional emission reductions should be used for company offsetting.

Voluntary carbon markets are key to cutting greenhouse-gas emissions in half by 2030, and clear data is key to ensuring they can deliver real reductions. Ecosystem Marketplace, the leading provider of data and intelligence on voluntary carbon markets, is responding with new interactive platforms offering unprecedented market transparency.

The chocolate business has decimated forests in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, but chocolate companies have promised to clean up their act. Trouble is, only a few have embraced agreed on practices for doing so.

Hundreds of companies voluntarily report on progress towards sustainability goals, but such reporting may soon be mandatory.

With more and more companies scrambling to achieve zero net greenhouse-gas emissions, the demand for voluntary carbon credits is skyrocketing. The Taskforce on Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets today published a detailed 138-page blueprint for ratcheting up the size of voluntary carbon markets without sacrificing quality. Here is a brief dive into the highlights.