From firewood to $55 million

Before these five months, Nepal spent twenty years in carbon markets and earned almost nothing.

The corresponding adjustment is Article 6.2 and 6.4 of the Paris Agreement.

Nepal is now in both: correspondingly adjusted credits for compliance buyers through LEAF, and — since the Regulation of December 2025 — a domestic voluntary market inside Nepal. A law forces the compliance buyer, so it shops on price. Nothing forces the voluntary buyer, so it shops on credibility — which is why an unglamorous, government-run, independently baselined programme is worth more to it than a clever one.

The Acid Rain Program is the proof: allowances traded at about a tenth of the price the EPA had projected, and the programme cost a fraction of what industry forecast. Not the same as saying it cut emissions at a tenth of projected cost — that conflates allowance price with programme cost, and the literature criticises it.

That subtraction is the corresponding adjustment. Nepal’s Regulation provides for it in Rule 16 — and LEAF is the first place anywhere it is offered to private buyers.

February 2026, the first Article 6.4 issuance — the first of about 165 transitioning projects. The CDM bar is implied, not published: it is what the reported 40% gap works back to. Nepal’s own biogas programme left the CDM on 5 July 2026 in the same transition.

Each gridline is ten times the last. Nepal sits in the bottom third — and moved from $5 to $10 in fourteen months. EU ETS converted from €82.85/t at ~1.16 USD/EUR, the same basis as the price table in the calculator.

2023 investigation, one registry’s REDD+ portfolio: most of the projects it could analyse showed no measurable benefit — and the underlying study drew a formal published rebuttal. This is a claim about what buyers now want, not proof of performance. Jurisdictional programmes carry their own baseline, leakage and reversal risks.

US$7m committed by the World Bank’s Community Development Carbon Fund; run by AEPC across 55 and 57 of Nepal’s 75 districts. An earlier application covering 19,396 plants was refused after the fund had already paid. The PoA registered 31 January 2013 with an initial 20,000 digesters; the route eventually covered more than 140,000.

In February 2026 the programme was extended by twelve months, to 31 December 2026 — the first extension. The money had arrived too late in the year to spend: the Benefit Sharing Plan was approved on 15 October 2025 and the payment landed on 13 November, leaving under a month before the original 31 December 2025 closing date.

Do not claim the shortfall was caused by weak measurement — the Bank does not say that. The stronger point is that creditable performance and forest performance are different quantities. The first reference level counted only fuelwood extraction as degradation; fire, grazing and felling came after the UNFCCC team’s 2018 recommendation.

Nobody has measured whether Nepal’s forests beat their reference level. This is the purest evidence for the argument the briefing is making.

The credit is what you can prove the forest did differently from a counterfactual, in two carbon pools, against a reference level.

Nepal delivered 1.88 Mt against 9 Mt contracted on the easier baseline. LEAF asks for up to 4 Mt against a harder one — which is what “up to US$55m” is really saying. FCPF’s baseline rests on a ten-year period ending around 2010–11.

Nepal did not build community forestry to sell carbon. It built it for firewood, fodder and floods — and tens of thousands of women have held elected forest-committee positions. The carbon market arrived thirty years late to something that already worked.

MoFE is the national authority; unauthorised carbon projects are prohibited (r.34). A Technical and a Steering Committee assess proposals (rr.29–30), and until the National Carbon Registry exists MoFE may use an international registry. Eligible proponents include community forest user groups — which sets up the next problem.

As far as I can find, nothing published reconciles the two regimes. If anyone here knows otherwise, please tell me. Do not blur the two 80 percents: r.107(8) sends 80% of income into the Fund; r.115 distributes 80% of what is in the Fund to the user group. Nobody has read the gazetted Nepali text.

Nepal is in the 86 countries with arrangements under way — not the 14 with both in place, not the 20 that have reported. The bilateral-agreements row is an inference: the page has no such row, and Nepal is absent from every counterparty list. Singapore has eleven full Implementation Agreements, about 28 arrangements overall.

Illustrative, not an official allocation: the 80% is a target still being negotiated, a further ~10% may go in operational costs, and provincial capacity is uneven. Communities are pushing for the full 80%. What is left is plumbing — and plumbing is solvable.

43 is a floor value, assigned identically to eleven other countries — Albania, Andorra, Bhutan, DR Congo, Iceland, Lesotho, Malawi, Monaco, Paraguay, San Marino and Eswatini. It is a default for hydro-dominated grids, not a measurement of Nepal’s, and the dataset is from July 2019. 673 ÷ 43 = 15.7.