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-- a _kt75 | reprint Download the Quarterly Notes on Sustainable Water Management - Q04/2013 Submit your Abstract for the next issue of the Quarterly Notes Global carbon markets traded a total €38.4 billion worth of allowances and credits during 2013, a 38% decrease from the €62bn the previous year, in a continuation of the decline that started after the market peaked at €96bn in 2011. Since then, the key European reference price of emissions has fallen from €18 to €5 per tonne of carbon dioxide. Last year also saw a decrease in terms of volumes – from 10.7 billion to 9.2 billion emission units – the first drop in traded volumes since 2010, according to analysis published today by Thomson Reuters Point Carbon, the leading provider of market intelligence, news, analysis and forecasting for the energy and environmental markets.The decline is most dramatic for the UN-led ‘flexible mechanisms’ that were created to incentivize emission abatement investments such as renewable e...

-- a note from _kt75 Since the economic (i.e. profitable) breakthrough of 'sustainability' in the beginning of this century the number of standards, protocols, labels and certificates, that in principle shall provide some form of sustainability guarantee of a certain product and/or service (but typically fail to provide such), has literally exploded. Today, labels and certificates (based upon standards and protocols of any possible nature) are as common as commercial product brands and created in a number of cases some sort of symbiosis with real products and/or services. This rather critical and actually adverse development basically has its origin in the formation of brand-awareness since the late 1960ies and can result in an undesirable because manipulated form of product and/or service dependency (by e.g. consumers) and prevent from unbiased sustainable development (i.e. it can help to preserve conditions that are not progressive, e.g. rescues of ailing banks). The...