ClimateCare has been voted Best Offset Retailer by the readers of Environmental Finance magazine. The award, announced yesterday, was one of three awards won by J.P. Morgan's voluntary markets team, out of a total eight categories, in Environmental Finance’s survey of the voluntary carbon markets.
Alongside Best Offset Retailer, J.P. Morgan was voted Best Trading Company and with the recent acquisition of EcoSecurities it has also won Best Project Developer. More than 500 votes were received in the survey which, for the first time this year, was conducted separately from Environmental Finance and Carbon Finance’s annual market survey, which polls readers on mandatory carbon markets, renewable energy finance, weather risk management, and sulphur and nitrogen oxides allowance markets.
Environmental Finance defines ‘voluntary carbon’ as carbon credits bought or sold to help organisations or individuals offset carbon emissions where they are not required by regulation to do so. This may be to help meet self-imposed emissions goals, or to gain experience ahead of carbon regulations – an important part of the voluntary carbon market in the US.
“J.P. Morgan has certainly built a strong franchise in the voluntary carbon space with its acquisitions of ClimateCare in 2008 and, last November, of EcoSecurities,” said Mark Nicholls, editor of Environmental Finance magazine.
The results are published in the February 2010 issue of Environmental Finance.