The US$14 Credit and the US$36 Credit Are the Same Tonne of Carbon. The Difference Is a Government Signature.

Carbon Forward Asia revealed what the market already suspects but few are willing to say out loud. The single biggest variable in carbon credit pricing is not quality, not methodology, not technology. It is whether a government has built the infrastructure to sign.

At Carbon Forward Asia in Singapore on 24 March 2026, a project developer stood up and broke down the cost of bringing a single carbon credit to market under CORSIA. US$5 in development costs. US$2.30 in programme labelling fees. Before any margin, any insurance premium, any return to investors or communities, the floor cost sits at US$7.30 per credit.

On the exchange, that same credit trades at around US$14.

Meanwhile, the Singapore government awarded its 1st Article 6 procurement contract in September 2025 for nature-based carbon credits. The deal covered 2.1 million tonnes at a total value of US$76 million. That works out to roughly US$36 per tonne.

Same asset class. Same underlying science. Same tonne of CO2 avoided or removed. One sells at US$14. The other at US$36. The difference between the two has nothing to do with the quality of the project, the rigour of the methodology, or the integrity of the MRV system. The difference is a government signature.

That signature has a formal name. It is called a corresponding adjustment.

What a Corresponding Adjustment Actually Means

Under the Paris Agreement, every country submits a Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) which sets out how much it intends to reduce emissions. When a country authorises a carbon credit for international transfer under Article 6, it must adjust its own emissions accounting to reflect the fact that the mitigation outcome now belongs to someone else. The host country adds a tonne to its reported emissions. The buyer country subtracts a tonne from its own. This prevents both sides from claiming the same reduction.

That adjustment is what separates a compliance-grade credit from a voluntary-market credit. Without it, a carbon credit is a certificate of good intentions. With it, the credit becomes a sovereign-backed instrument that can be used against carbon tax obligations, airline offset mandates, and national climate targets.

The entire pricing architecture of the emerging carbon market rests on this distinction. And most countries have not built the infrastructure to provide it.

The 3-Year Timeline That Should Worry Everyone

Carbon Forward Asia offered a detailed case study in what it actually takes to execute an Article 6 transaction. Thailand and Switzerland signed a bilateral agreement in 2022. That agreement covered the framework for transferring carbon credits between the 2 countries. The 1st actual transfer of credits did not happen until 2025. A technical expert review to verify the credibility of those transferred credits was initiated during COP 30 in November 2025 and was still not complete at the time of the conference.

3 years from bilateral agreement to 1st transfer. And the process is still not finished.

This is not a failing of Thailand or Switzerland. Both countries are among the most advanced in the world on Article 6 implementation. This is simply what it takes to build the institutional infrastructure for sovereign-to-sovereign carbon transactions. National greenhouse gas inventories need to be robust enough to support accounting decisions. Ministries need legal authority to authorise credits. Biennial transparency reports need to be submitted to the UNFCCC in the correct format with the correct appendices. Government officials need to be able to access the UNFCCC’s reporting platform, which, as one panellist at the conference noted, some cannot do due to basic technical access issues.

Perhaps most telling was what another speaker admitted during the CORSIA panel. Nobody has a clear, worked example of what a corresponding adjustment actually looks like inside a biennial transparency report. Countries have submitted BTRs only to be told the content was in the wrong appendix or the wrong format, forcing them back to their national designated authorities to redo the work. One panellist described government officials in partner countries who could not even upload documents to the UNFCCC platform due to basic technical difficulties. These are not theoretical barriers. These are the lived realities of the people tasked with making this system function. The mechanism that determines whether a carbon credit is worth US$14 or US$36 has not yet been demonstrated end to end in a single fully completed, fully verified, fully reported transaction.

The Thailand timeline is not an outlier. It is a preview of what every country in the region will face.

The CDM Transition Tells the Same Story

The conference surfaced another dataset that reinforces the point. More than 300 CDM projects and activities in Southeast Asia are eligible to transition into the Article 6.4 mechanism, the successor to the old Clean Development Mechanism. Fewer than a third of those projects actually requested transition. Of those that did request it, only about 20% received host country approval.

Run the arithmetic. Roughly 6% to 7% of eligible CDM projects in Southeast Asia will make it through the Article 6.4 pipeline. The rest will either shut down or continue selling into the voluntary market without corresponding adjustments, without compliance eligibility, and without the pricing premium that comes with a government signature.

The reason is structural. Under the old CDM, host countries did not need to account for credits against their own climate targets. They simply approved projects and the credits were issued centrally. Under Article 6, countries must decide whether they can afford to “let go” of the emission reductions. That decision requires an accounting system robust enough to model whether the country can still meet its NDC after authorising the transfer. Most countries in the region do not have that accounting capacity in place.

The Demand Is Real. The Pipes Are Not.

The demand signals from Day 1 of Carbon Forward Asia were unambiguous. The EU has agreed to allow up to 5% of its 2040 emissions reduction target to be met through international carbon credits. Conservative estimates put this at a floor of 237 million tonnes of demand. CORSIA, the aviation offset scheme, projects demand of 63 to 75 million tonnes for 2025 alone. Singapore’s carbon tax allows companies to offset up to 5% of their obligations using international credits, translating to approximately 2.5 million tonnes per year. Japan’s Joint Crediting Mechanism (JCM) remains one of the largest Article 6.2 demand sources through 2030.

Bloomberg NEF presented forecasts at the conference projecting Article 6 credit demand reaching US$4.7 to 7.2 billion. But they also showed that in the early years, prices will stay below US$20 per tonne because of an influx of lower-quality credits from the CDM transition. Only as that supply is absorbed and demand tightens will prices rise above US$100 per tonne.

The demand exists. The financing exists. What does not exist, in most of the countries that hold the greatest potential for high-quality nature-based credit supply, is the sovereign infrastructure to authorise, account for, and transfer credits into compliance markets.

Singapore has signed 10 implementation agreements with partner countries and 15 memorandum of understanding (MOUs). It has launched 2 government procurement rounds. It engages independent rating agencies to assess credit quality. And critically, it has built the domestic regulatory architecture to absorb Article 6 credits into its carbon tax compliance framework.

The countries that should be supplying credits into that framework are, with a few exceptions, not ready. Their credits exist. Their projects are real. Their methodologies are rigorous. But the government signature that converts a voluntary credit into a compliance asset is missing.

The Coalition Exists Because the Problem Exists

The Coalition to Grow Carbon Markets, launched in June 2025 and co-chaired by representatives from Kenya, Singapore, and the UK, published 6 shared principles on carbon credit supply and demand. The stated purpose of those principles is to give corporates the confidence to invest in carbon credits by providing a government-endorsed quality benchmark.

The fact that such a coalition needs to exist is itself evidence of the problem. If government authorization frameworks were functioning, if corresponding adjustments were routine, if the pathway from project to compliance market were clear, corporates would not need a coalition to give them “air cover.” The coalition is a workaround for the absence of the government signature at the country level.

What This Means for the Market

The carbon market is not one market. It is 2 markets separated by a government signature. In the 1st market, credits trade at US$5 to 15 per tonne, margins are thin to negative for high-integrity projects, and buyers use credits for corporate claims that carry no compliance weight. In the 2nd market, credits trade at US$25 to 36 per tonne today, with forecasts exceeding US$100 as demand tightens, and they can be used against carbon tax obligations, CORSIA mandates, and national emission targets.

The barrier between these 2 markets is not methodology. It is not MRV technology. It is not project design or community engagement or scientific rigour. It is whether the host country government has built the institutional infrastructure to authorise credits, negotiate bilateral agreements, submit transparency reports in the correct format, and make corresponding adjustments against its NDC.

Project developers cannot solve this on their own. Rating agencies cannot solve it. Registries cannot solve it. Investors cannot price it away. The only entity that can convert a voluntary credit into a compliance asset is a sovereign government that has done the preparatory work.

The countries that build this infrastructure first will capture the compliance demand wave. Their project developers will sell at US$36 and above. Their communities will receive meaningful benefit-sharing from credits that command real value. Their conservation outcomes will be financed at scale.

The countries that do not will watch their projects sell at US$14 into a market that does not recognise their quality, while Singapore procures from Rwanda and Ghana at more than double the price.

The same tonne. The same carbon. The only difference is which government signed the paper.

The question worth sitting with is this. How long can countries with the richest natural capital afford to leave that signature unsigned, while the buyers who need their credits are already writing cheques to someone else?

Norita Ja’afar is Director of Tabah Asia, a project developer operating across Malaysia. She is co-author of Cercarbono’s CM-LU-CW-001 Blue Carbon Methodology for Coastal Wetlands, Country Leader of the Global Mangrove Alliance Malaysia Chapter, and Leads Johor State Carbon Credit Development Mechanism Task Force. www.noritajaafar.com