July 2024 VCM Updates: Section A

This article is an automatically translated version of the original Japanese article. Please refer to the Japanese version for the most accurate information.

This is a newsletter from sustainacraft Inc. This article is Section A (Market Trends) of VCM Updates (Voluntary Carbon Market Updates).

This section introduces Booking Holdings, which operates Booking.com, as one of the companies that retired Carbon Credits in June 2024. Last month's newsletter highlighted the significant investment and Credit procurement in Sequestration-based Credits, such as Afforestation, by a group of U.S. tech companies, primarily Microsoft. Consumer goods and services companies are also procuring and retiring Carbon Credits to a certain extent when looking at overseas markets.

Consumer goods and services companies often have over 95% of their Greenhouse Gas emissions in Scope 3. It appears that a trend is emerging where these companies declare Carbon Credit procurement for their Scope 3 emissions, thereby strengthening engagement with suppliers and business partners and accelerating Emission Reductions.

On the other hand, caution is needed regarding what claims companies make externally about their services and products when using Credits. Last month, we introduced the content of the EU Green Claims Directive. Booking Holdings, featured here, has also received criticism from the Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets for making misleading environmental claims in the operation of its "Travel Sustainable" program. Please refer to the main body below for details.

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«Structure of VCM Updates»

A. Voluntary Carbon Credit Market Trends ← Subject of this article

1. Credit Issuance and Retirement Analysis
2. Project Pipeline Analysis

B. Trends in Major Overseas Regulations

A. Voluntary Carbon Credit Market Trends (Verra)

A-1: Credit Issuance and Retirement Trends

- Registries analyzed: Verra, GS (Gold Standard), CAR (Climate Action Reserve), ACR (American Carbon Registry)
- Period: June 2024
- Note: Please be aware that companies are not obligated to register their actual names with the registry for Credits retired, and therefore, accuracy cannot be guaranteed. Also, there may be delays in reflection on the registry, so please note that the number of projects and status changes for this period may vary in the future.

Issuance and Retirement performance for the period is as follows (figures in parentheses are year-on-year changes for the same month):

• Issuance: 24.86 million (-18%), of which Nature-based 2.35 million (-84%)
• Retirement: 10.58 million (-6%), of which Nature-based 3.00 million (-21%)

<List of Retired Projects>

The list of Nature-based projects retired during this period is as follows. The top 20 projects account for approximately 82% of total Retirements.

The first project is the Tahuamanu Amazon REDD+ project (accounting for 27% of retired volume). It is an Avoided Deforestation project in Peru, implemented under the VM0006 Methodology. This Methodology applies to mosaic and landscape-scale REDD+ projects. VM0006 is one of the Methodologies covered by the new REDD+ Methodology VM0048. For more details on VM0048, please refer to our December 2023 Methodology newsletter.

<List of Retiring Companies>

The top 20 companies that retired Nature-based Credits during this period are as follows. The company that retired the most Credits is Booking Holdings, followed by VistaJet and Netflix. This newsletter will focus on Booking Holdings' strategy and briefly mention Netflix. Netflix was also featured in last month's newsletter.

Company Case Study

About Booking Holdings

(For main sources, please refer to [1], [2], [3] below.)

Booking Holdings is a U.S.-based company that provides travel booking services and search engines. Currently, Booking Holdings includes many websites, such as Booking.com, Agoda, Momondo, Kayak, OpenTable, and Cheapflights.

This section will cover the following regarding Booking Holdings (hereafter "Booking"): (1) Net Zero targets (including predictions for consumer behavior), (2) three commitments, and (3) Carbon Credit portfolio (including June's Retirements).

According to Booking's Climate Action Plan submitted in 2022, the company aims for near-zero emissions by 2030 and Net Zero by 2040, in alignment with the Paris Agreement.