On the one hand, a large number of companies have committed to achieve net zero emissions and many of them foresee to offset some remaining emissions with carbon credits, suggesting a surge of future demand. Yet, the supply side of the voluntary carbon market is struggling to align its business model with the new legal architecture of the Paris Agreement. This article juxtaposes these two perspectives. It provides an overview of the plans of 482 major companies with some form of neutrality/net zero pledge and traces the struggle on the supply side of the voluntary carbon market to come up with a viable business model that ensures environmental integrity and contributes to achieving the objectives of the Paris Agreement. Our analysis finds that if carbon credits are used to offset remaining emissions against neutrality objectives, these credits need to be accounted against the host countries' Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) to ensure environmental integrity. Yet, operationalizing this approach is challenging and will require innovative solutions and political support. Key policy insights:. There is a growing mismatch between the faith placed in carbon credits by private sector companies and the continued quest for a common position of the main suppliers of the voluntary carbon market. . The voluntary carbon market has not yet found a way to align itself with the new legal architecture of the Paris Agreement in a credible and legitimate way. . Public policy support at the national and international level will be needed to operationalize a robust approach for the market's future activities.

Africa and in particular African Least Developed Countries (LDCs) have in the past been neglected by the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) to a large extent. This article reviews the mechanism's performance in the region and highlights current developments. The analysis is based on a quantitative breakdown of data provided by the UNEP DTU CDM Pipeline and was complemented by interviews with selected investors. The findings indicate that despite the various support measures for underrepresented regions, the overall share of African CDM activities continues to be low. The significant rise in the share of Programmes of Activities (PoAs) of recent years cannot make up for the continuing low numbers of African stand-alone projects. Further, the collapse of the compliance market has proved fatal in terms of timing: Ongoing efforts to support the development of a genuine African carbon market were suffocated by the lack of demand for CERs at a moment when capacity building had started to bear fruit. Consequently, instead of being a mitigation tool with significant scale the future role of the CDM in Africa might be limited to the voluntary market while at the same time serving as a tool to foster sustainable development, with mitigation benefits.

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Last year's conference of the global climate change regime took place from 2 until 15 December 2018 in Katowice, Poland. The conference had two main objectives: operationalising the Paris Agreement by adopting detailed rules for its implementation, and starting the process of strengthening Parties' climate protection contributions. This article covers the negotiations on these two sets of issues and also includes a discussion of other recent climate activities by Parties and non-Party actors.Success of the negotiations in Katowice was far from assured, but in the end COP24 concluded with the adoption of the "Katowice Climate Package" setting out detailed guidelines on how to implement its various elements. However, the conference fell short on the first objective, none of the major emitting countries was ready to step up its climate ambition. The most important aspect of the Katowice outcome is therefore that it has brought the wrangling about implementation procedures to a close, making way for the true task at hand: the strengthening of national and international activities to protect the climate and the implementation of the existing pledges.Arguably, a key factor that has been slowing down climate policy is the power of entrenched interests. The article therefore concludes with a reflection on how such barriers to climate action may be overcome and what role future COPs may play in this regard.