A United Nations climate panel will ask a working group to investigate further claims that a Kyoto Protocol scheme may be incentivising participants to emit more greenhouse gases, it said on Friday. Several carbon-cutting projects approved under Kyoto's $2.7 billion Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which helps provide carbon finance to emerging economies, have been accused by green groups of intentionally increasing their emissions in order to destroy them and collect more carbon offsets.
The panel is probing roughly 20 projects and they are the most lucrative under the scheme. Most of them are in China and India. They eliminate a potent waste gas called hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) and account for more than half of the 423.5 million offsets issued to the 2,300 projects approved to date.