Hong Kong’s Core Climate aims to facilitate trading of carbon credits, while the Hub plans to expedite Singapore’s ESG ecosystem growth.
By Farhana Sharmeen, Paul A. Davies, and James Bee
On 28 October 2022, the Hong Kong Exchange and Clearing Limited (HKEX) launched Core Climate, Hong Kong’s International Carbon Marketplace. The birth of Core Climate is a further step toward the growth of ESG initiatives in Asia, which are gaining particular traction among the continent’s stock exchanges.
HKEX hopes that Core Climate will support the global energy transition by facilitating an effective and transparent trading of carbon credits. Participants on the Core Climate platform will be able to trade, hold, settle, source, and retire voluntary carbon credits, and the platform’s carbon credits will come from internationally certified projects around the world, including carbon avoidance, reduction, and removal projects. All projects listed on Core Climate are verified against international standards, but whether HKEX will publish a specific list of international standards acceptable for this purpose is not clear at this stage.