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Sharing the stage: state of the voluntary carbon markets 2014 – executive summary

Forest Trends’ Ecosystem Marketplace released the executive summary of the State of the Voluntary Carbon Markets 2014 report, now in its eighth year of publication. In a bid to reduce their impact on greenhouse gas emissions, corporate leaders like Chevrolet, Marks & Spencer, and Allianz continued to voluntarily purchase carbon offsets in 2013, locking 76 million metric tonnes of greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere, according to the annual State of the Voluntary Carbon Markets report, previewed by Forest Trends’ Ecosystem Marketplace in Cologne, Germany. These and other diverse actors paid $379 million for carbon offsets to neutralize emissions that they couldn’t directly reduce. This value supports hundreds of environmental projects, particularly those that reduce or avoid deforestation (“REDD”), install wind energy, or distribute cleaner-burning cookstoves in the developing world.