Green knights? Banks step into struggling carbon credit markets

Clearer global standards and a new exchange may attract dealer entry, but supply and demand challenges remain

The fledgling market for carbon emissions offsets is dreaming big – of a world in which global financial institutions champion funding for communities on the front lines of the climate crisis and help companies elsewhere clean up their hard-to-reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Yet, as others in the financial industry prepared to realise the market’s ambitions for exponential growth, banks have mostly stayed away – leaving financing for credit-producing projects and trading of carbon credits to