Exploring buyers' preferences for voluntary carbon credits

The third Easter term seminar of the Cambridge Centre for Environment, Energy and Natural Resources Governance (CEENRG) in the Department of Land Economy takes place this week on Thursday, 15 May 2025, at 3-4 pm (UK Time) in the Main Seminar Room (1.25) on the 1st floor of the David Attenborough Building. You are cordially invited to join our friendly discussion in person (no registration needed) or online (please register to receive the Zoom link on the day of the seminar).

For this seminar, we are delighted to welcome as a speaker Tara L'Horty, PhD Candidate at the French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment (INRAE), Climate Economics Chair at Paris Dauphine University - PSL, and Bureau for Economic Theory and Applications(BETA) at the University of Lorraine. She will join us in person with a talk ‘Exploring buyers' preferences for voluntary carbon credits.’ Please find below the abstract of the talk.

Voluntary carbon markets are emerging as powerful tools for channeling cross-border financial resources toward climate mitigation strategies. These markets trade carbon credits generated by a wide array of projects—each unique, heterogeneous, and varying in quality—and attract a diverse group of buyers. Yet, due to scarce transaction data, our understanding of buyers' preferences across these varied attributes remains limited. In this presentation, we introduce the concept of “willingness-to-claim” to shed light on market demand dynamics. By analyzing the retirement rates of carbon offset projects, we capture the cross-sectional variation in buyers’ willingness to claim certificates based on specific project attributes and contextual factors. We then compare this indicator with ex-post evaluations from the literature to determine how the quality of voluntary carbon credits influences market demand.