Abatable is a world-leading technology company dedicated to providing end-to-end carbon market solutions. Recognizing the urgent need to address climate change, Abatable has developed innovative solutions to help organizations reduce their carbon footprint and contribute to a healthier planet.
As a leading provider of carbon offsetting and procurement services, the company recently announced its partnership with the Paris 2024 Olympic Games to source and vet six high-impact climate action projects that would expand the Games’ global impact.
We sat down with CEO and co-founder Valerio Magliulo to talk about this partnership and understand how through its advanced platform, Abatable is empowering organizations to make informed decisions about their carbon emissions and support projects that have a positive impact on the environment and communities.
With a focus on transparency, accountability, and rigorous quality standards, Abatable ensures that the carbon credits its clients purchase are verified and deliver real, measurable environmental benefits.
Valerio, in a report on carbon markets in March 2024, Abatable said that the voluntary carbon market (VCM) was at a critical point – is that still the case and what are the main challenges you’re seeing?
The VCM is definitely still at a very similar critical point. We’ve seen over the past year and a half so many initiatives to tackle issues of integrity in the first version of the VCM, such as the IC-VCM’s Core Carbon Principles, which are now starting to be rolled out and show a heightened scrutiny and attention towards quality and integrity.
I think the supply side of the market is getting to a place where we can comfortably see a path for it to scale to the dimensions we need it to reach to adequately respond to climate change. The critical point still remains on the demand side. As the VCM is by its nature a voluntary market, it still relies on many corporates’ willingness to engage and go above and beyond to support climate action outside of the scope of their own emissions.
And we’ve just not been seeing enough incentives being created for companies to do so.
Relevant: New Abatable Analysis: Carbon Credit Demand Will Exceed Supply
We’ve also seen quite a lot of mixed signals about whether engaging with voluntary carbon offsetting and similar activities is appropriate or not. Is it a distraction or is it a critical pathway to net zero?
At Abatable we do believe that it is part of the critical path to net zero. And the longer we wait, the harder it’s going to be to abate emissions and the harder it’s going to be to stay within the 2-degree temperature threshold to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
You mentioned the ICVCM’s Core Carbon Principles, has there been any impact on the market from your perspective since their initial rollout?
The initiative has been developed over the past year-and-a-half to two years, and its details are very promising.
I think the key will be in the implementation and both in how fast those labels can be rolled out, as well as in how many methodologies and projects will make the cut.
There has been recent news that specific renewable energy methodologies have not received approval under the IC-VCM framework, which was to be expected. We predicted that back in March, as we’d analysed those methodologies and had given them a medium to low likelihood of receiving a CCP label.
So, that means the framework is doing what the market expected it to do: help weed out the projects that fall short in terms of their integrity and the quality of their output.
Relevant: ICVCM Unveils First Approved Methodologies Under Core Carbon Principles
But there are many other project types for which we still don’t know what the outcome of the IC-VCM process will be and what that will mean not only for the potentially available supply in the coming years, but also for the many unretired credits that are still on the market.
About 374 million credits that fall under these renewables methodologies have already been retired by companies. And then there’s another 236 million that are unretired.
So there’s the question of what will happen to these: will there be some transition pathways or will they be completely written off?
And, of course, there’s also the question of what that will do to prices.
Do you see changes on the demand side of the market? Are corporates and mid-size players acting differently?
The VCM word of the year in 2023 was ‘hesitation’. I think many companies were just in ‘wait-and-see’ mode to understand how a lot of these integrity initiatives were going to be implemented.
Now that’s sort of settled, I think a lot of corporates are starting to lean more aggressively and more effectively into the market. We’ve seen the Symbiosis Coalition taking a very strong stance and saying they do believe that nature-based solutions are going to play a critical role in their net-zero strategy.
They’ve made a public commitment to purchase 20 million tonnes of nature-based carbon removal credits by 2030. And many other organisations have taken note. But I think, in general, there’s still a sort of mild anxiety of not knowing how this will play out in the various net-zero frameworks that are out there for corporates.
Concerns are with the SBTi, for instance, and to what extent it will allow carbon credits to play a role under its Corporate Net Zero Standard.
Tell us more about Abatable’s partnership with the Olympic Games Paris 2024. Do you plan more similar partnerships in the future?
I’m very proud of the work we’ve done with Paris 2024. The relationship has been in the making for over three years now, during which we’ve effectively been acting as a partner in their climate contribution strategy.
Paris 2024 has set a very ambitious agenda to be one of the more sustainable Olympic and Paralympic Games in history.
And they’ve already made pretty strong efforts within the value chain to get to roughly half the emissions of London or Rio, making them more comparable to perhaps Tokyo, which was held during COVID. The remaining carbon budget was then used as a way to contribute to projects and activities happening outside of the value chain of the Games.
And we’ve been working with them to continuously refine that strategy. As you can imagine, a lot has changed in the voluntary carbon market in the past three years since they first set out to do this.
Relevant: Abatable Partners With The Olympic Games Paris 2024 To Deliver Lasting Climate Legacy
But through our sourcing platform we’ve helped them run a competitive and transparent process to identify hundreds of potential project proposals that fit their requirements, their strategy and their quality criteria.
We helped screen all those opportunities and create a shortlist to help them structure investments and transactions with six projects across a range of project types, showcasing the diversity of the VCM.
And so a lot of the work that we’ve been doing has really shone a light onto our capabilities to source from the entire market and find the right projects for our clients.
From a bigger picture perspective, one of the things I’m most excited about is that even for an event like Paris 2024, which will soon be over and then it will be on to the next Games, there is still a focus on leaving a positive and lasting legacy –not just in terms of the sports, but also in terms of climate, nature and people.
And so the idea of climate contribution as a viable model for private organisations to contribute to climate projects and climate activities is an exciting one.
Can you share more about Themes, the market intelligence feature you recently unveiled?
Our market intelligence platform contains our insights, research and frameworks that we’ve developed to tackle what we believe to be the big risks and the bigger unknowns in the market.
After speaking to many of our customers and listening to their feedback, there were several initiatives and topics that have been developing in the market over the past year or so crossing all of these different factors, the first one being CORSIA.
So the CORSIA Theme touches on policy across different countries, it touches on prices, and it touches on supply and demand availability. And so we built Themes as a collection of insights across all the different buckets of areas of expertise from Abatable, bringing them together under a single umbrella.
We aim to provide an understanding, from a thematic perspective, of what’s happening around CORSIA, for example, which is the first Theme we launched, but also the IC-VCM’s Core Carbon Principles as a second Theme.
What is in the pipeline for Abatable?
Lots of exciting things! It’s been a very busy year for us with the Paris announcement. We’ve got some upcoming product launches in relation to market intelligence specifically, which will go live during Climate Week NYC.
The best way to describe the first initiative is that it will expand the reach of our market intelligence product and give access to as many potential market participants as possible without a paid subscription. So, we’re continuing to push to increase transparency in the market and are giving back our insights and our research to as many market players as possible.
Also, this will be the second year running of our VCM Investment Attractiveness Index. This is an index we developed last year to effectively rank countries based on their potential to harness the power of carbon markets.
So it’ll be interesting to see how countries have changed positions based on changes in those countries over the last year. There are a couple of interesting developments this time around.
Relevant: Abatable & Gold Standard Announce New Article 6 Partnership
And the last one is we’re making some changes to our carbon credit sourcing platform to accelerate how much more climate action can be achieved, particularly in preparation for Q4, which we know is one of the busiest times of the year.
So we’ll be making much more inventory across the entire market accessible to as many market participants as possible.
Finally, we have a few more partnerships lined up, which we really love at Abatable. We’ve got a large report coming up that we’ve developed in partnership with governments in a specific region of the world that is investing heavily into carbon markets. We’ve helped them figure how that’s going to shape what the benefits to these countries will be, and how market participants can engage.
And there are also a few more private partnerships similar to Paris, which I’m incredibly excited about.
