Singapore’s Ministry of Trade (MTI) and National Climate Change Secretariat (NCCS) announced that the government will contract more than 2 million tonnes of nature-based carbon credits from four projects in Ghana, Peru, and Paraguay, as part of the island city-state’s initiatives to meet its climate goals.
Singapore has set a goal to achieve net zero emissions by 2050, and a Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) target to reduce emissions to around 60 million tonnes of CO2e by 2030, after peaking emissions earlier. NDCs are national climate action plans presented by each country under the Paris Agreement, and are required to be updated every five years with increasingly higher ambition.
The announcement follows an international agreement reached at the COP29 UN climate conference in November 2024, on Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, aimed at establishing high integrity carbon markets, including on Article 6.2, detailing how countries will authorize carbon credit trading and how registries tracking this trading will operate to enable country-to-country carbon market trading.
According to the MTI and NCCS, the new carbon removal agreements will help Singapore achieve its 2030 NDC. The agencies noted that despite initiatives including introducing a carbon tax, and investing in solar deployment, renewable energy imports, and carbon capture and storage, Singapore’s ability to fully decarbonize is constrained, “as a small, densely populated, island city-state with limited natural resources,” with the Article 6 agreement providing a way to help the state meet its climate goals.
The MTI and NCCS said:
“The use of carbon credits under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement provides a viable and effective complementary pathway for countries such as Singapore to achieve our decarbonisation targets, while pursuing all other feasible decarbonisation pathways.”
The new agreements follows an RFP issued by Singapore in September 2024, aimed at identifying projects around the world that could high quality nature-based solutions carbon credits with high environmental integrity, including key features such as ensuring additionality, low leakage risks, permanence, and co-benefits to surrounding communities.
Singapore said that it selected four projects as a result of the RFP, procuring carbon credits representing 2,175 million of emissions reductions from 2026 to 2030, and at a value of approximately S$76 million (USD$60 million).
The projects selected include Kowen Antami REDD+, a forest protection project in Peru; Together for Forests REDD+, aimed at reducing deforestation, also in Peru; the Boomitra Grassland Restoration Project in Paraguay, and; the Kwahu Landscape Restoration Project, an Afforestation, Reforestation, and Revegetation (ARR) project in Ghana.
The government agencies said:
“These projects aim to reduce carbon emissions from deforestation, increase carbon sequestration of soil organic carbon stock in grasslands through sustainable management practices, and remove carbon emissions through the reforestation of degraded pastureland. Carbon credits help to channel funds towards the preservation or regeneration of host countries’ natural carbon sinks and biodiversity, safeguard local communities’ access to income from sustainable land use and provide ecosystem benefits such as improving water quality.”
The MTI and NCCS added that a second RFP for such Article 6-compliant carbon credits will be launched later this year.
