Demand for offsets is soaring. More credits were traded in the first eight months of this year than in all of 2020, according to BloombergNEF, as companies and governments spend billions of dollars to meet net-zero emissions targets and burnish their green credentials.

In the coming years, the UN credits could become a kind of global benchmark, with other voluntary carbon credit prices trading in relation, according to Henrik Hasselknippe, who’s in charge of carbon exchanges at Xpansiv, where more than 100 million metric tons of the credits have traded this year.

“Markets can handle multiple standards,” Hasselknippe said. “That’s something that we see in many markets.”