Article 6 of the Paris Agreement lets countries meet their climate targets by trading verified emissions cuts with each other, or by buying credits from a new United Nations registry that issued its first-ever credits on 26 February 2026. Both routes exist because the treaty lets a country do some of its climate work by paying for cuts made somewhere else, provided the ton is claimed once, not twice.
Two routes carry that trade. Article 6.2 covers deals struck directly between governments. Article 6.4 runs the UN’s own crediting system, built to replace the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism. A third clause, Article 6.8, covers cooperation that never creates a tradable credit at all.
How a bilateral deal works
Under Article 6.2, one country can pay for emissions cuts made in another country and count the result toward its own climate target. The unit that changes hands is an internationally transferred mitigation outcome, or ITMO, and the UNFCCC secretariat runs a registry that follows each one from issuance through use so a buyer and seller can’t both claim the same ton.
Switzerland has struck this kind of deal with Ghana and Vanuatu, buying verified cuts and sending funding and technology the other way. Switzerland’s trade-off is the one you’d face too, paying for someone else’s cheaper cut now instead of spending more to build that capacity in your own backyard.
The trade depends on the reduction being counted exactly once. The moment a host country’s project cuts a ton of emissions and sells it, that country subtracts the ton from its own national tally, the way a bank debits one account the instant it credits another. That step is called a corresponding adjustment, and it’s the reason Article 6.2 comes with so much accounting machinery. Article 6.2 is one route into international carbon pricing, sitting alongside the domestic carbon taxes and cap-and-trade programs countries run at home.
Why Brazil wants an exception
Not every country agrees a corresponding adjustment should apply everywhere. The Paris Agreement’s own text requires parties to avoid double counting through what it calls “robust accounting”, and Article 6.2 turns that requirement into a specific rule Brazil now disputes. Brazil has proposed that a country hosting a mechanism project should skip the adjustment altogether, an idea negotiators call option C.
The commodities journalist Alessandro Vitelli called the position hard to square with ordinary bookkeeping, noting that Brazil operates banks and so must know the practice runs counter to financial accounting standards. If host countries won that argument, the same ton of avoided emissions could count toward two countries’ targets at once. That’s the double counting the whole framework exists to stop, and it’s still unsettled between negotiators. If you’ve bought something billed as carbon neutral, this dispute is exactly why that label can mean a real ton cut, or the same ton counted twice.
The UN’s own credit system
Article 6.4 works differently from a bilateral deal. Instead of one government paying another directly, a project anywhere in the world can register with the Paris Agreement Crediting Mechanism, sell the resulting credits to any government or company that wants them, and let the UN’s own registry track the trade. An independent group called the Supervisory Body runs the mechanism and can approve or reject the methods projects use to count their cuts.
A share of the money each credit earns is set aside for adaptation funding in developing countries, a design feature carried over from the mechanism’s founding rules. For a country in line for that money, it’s earmarked to help you adapt to climate impacts, apart from whatever emissions cut the credit itself represents. The mechanism is meant to replace the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism, the system that ran carbon offsets for years before the Paris rules took over.
Many of that older system’s projects are now applying to move into the new one. IETA, the trade group for carbon market participants, keeps a public directory of projects that have received the authorization Article 6.2 requires, drawn from multiple crediting registries.
What COP29 in Baku settled
Negotiators spent nine years turning Article 6’s language into working rules, finishing most of the job at the COP29 climate conference in Baku, Azerbaijan. On 11 November 2024, the conference’s opening day, parties agreed the technical standards that let Article 6.4 crediting begin, plus a process for updating those standards over time.
The World Resources Institute put the potential savings from wider Article 6 use at $250 billion a year by 2030, a figure UNFCCC’s own briefing on the deal also cited. If your own government is one of the ones counting on those savings, that’s money freed up for clean power and grid upgrades at home instead of paying full price for cuts alone.
A separate decision on Article 6.2 followed near the close of the conference, around 23 November 2024. It set up a shared registry for countries that don’t run their own tracking systems and requires governments to disclose deal terms before a trade closes, which closes off a loophole where a country could weaken a deal without the other side finding out.
The timeline so far
Four dates mark how this framework moved from negotiating text to credits you might eventually see behind a company’s climate claim.
| Date | What happened |
|---|---|
| 11 November 2024 | COP29 agreed the technical standards for Article 6.4 crediting |
| 23 November 2024 | COP29 finalized the Article 6.2 rules for country to country trading |
| 30 October 2025 | The Article 6.4 Supervisory Body approved its first methodology, for landfill methane |
| 26 February 2026 | The UN issued the first Article 6.4 credits, to a cookstove project in Myanmar |
Source: UNFCCC news releases and Carbon Brief’s COP29 coverage.
The first credits, and what they are worth
The Supervisory Body approved the mechanism’s first new methodology on 30 October 2025, covering projects that capture or burn off methane from landfills. Projects that only flare the gas lose crediting value faster over time than projects that burn it to generate power, a rule built to reward the more useful option.
Four months later, on 26 February 2026, the UN issued the mechanism’s first credits, to a clean cooking program in Myanmar that distributes efficient stoves to cut fuelwood demand and household smoke. If you were one of the households getting one of those stoves, the credit behind it means less smoke inside your own kitchen long before it shows up as a line on a UN ledger. Those credited reductions came in about 40% lower than an older system would have issued, because the mechanism applies more conservative accounting than its Kyoto-era predecessor.
Across broader carbon crediting markets, issuance rose 8% from 2024 to 2025, the World Bank found, while Article 6’s own pipeline was still producing its first projects.
The quality fight over old credits moving into the new system
Thousands of old Clean Development Mechanism projects want a path into the new system, and the rules let them apply if they meet its standards. As of March 2025, roughly 1,389 of those projects and 119 programmes had filed to transition, according to Carbon Market Watch. The watchdog group flagged one Myanmar cookstove project it said was on track to issue about 26 times more credits than the emissions cuts it delivers, based on peer-reviewed research on that type of project.
IETA also runs a bilateral agreements tracker that maps who is buying and who is hosting under Article 6.2, and it called mechanisms like Article 6 non-negotiable links between countries and companies cutting emissions across borders, in its assessment of the year published on 2 December 2025. The Supervisory Body is the group deciding which of those filed projects clear its bar, and it hasn’t finished that review. If you or your company buys one of these credits, you’re trusting an accounting system that’s still being built project by project.
