National Carbon Credit Registry

Article 6.2 of the Paris Agreement requires every participating country to "have, or have access to, a registry" for tracking internationally transferred mitigation outcomes (ITMOs) (Decision 2/CMA.3, para 29) and to submit annual information in an agreed electronic format. Many developing countries lack this digital infrastructure. Without a national registry they cannot authorize ITMOs, apply corresponding adjustments, or prevent double counting and double claiming of emission reductions — which blocks their access to Article 6 carbon finance and undermines the integrity of their NDCs. The National Carbon Credit Registry addresses this gap: it is an open-source toolkit that lets any country set up a sovereign registry tracking the full carbon credit lifecycle — project registration, authorization, verification, issuance and serialization, transfer, and retirement — with every transaction recorded immutably on a ledger and public data exposed for transparency.

NCCR converts Paris Agreement rules into executable national processes: by giving governments the registry infrastructure Article 6.2 presupposes, it lets countries serialize credits, track first transfers, apply corresponding adjustments and report through the Agreed Electronic Format, unlocking results-based climate finance. Immutable ledger records and public transparency reduce double-counting risk and raise buyer confidence. It does not itself reduce emissions; it enables mitigation by making national carbon markets trustworthy, financeable and accountable.

NCCR directly operationalises UNFCCC Decisions 2/CMA.3 and 6/CMA.4: credits are serialized as ITMOs in the unique-identifier format of 6/CMA.4 para 17; cooperative approaches and Initial Reports are modelled per 2/CMA.3 and gate project authorization; first transfers are tracked at credit-block level to support corresponding adjustments and prevent double counting; and the system auto-generates Agreed Electronic Format reports (Actions, Holdings, Annual Information) for annual UNFCCC submission.

The registry supports decisions across all three categories. For policy and planning, Designated National Authorities use it to create Article 6.2 cooperative approaches, authorize projects against their NDC strategy, compute corresponding adjustments, and generate UNFCCC-ready reports — while ministries and climate funds (e.g. the Sri Lanka Climate Fund) oversee national credit balances. For investment and finance, project developers register carbon projects and transfer serialized credits, and buyers access transparent transaction records that inform climate-finance decisions. At the operational level, independent validation and verification bodies submit the certification reports that gate credit issuance. All roles operate under enforced permissions with full audit trails.

A service-oriented TypeScript/NestJS system where each service (national API, analytics API, ledger replicator, async-operations handler, data importer) is independently deployable and selected by configuration. All services are stateless and share a domain library of ~50 encapsulated modules. Integration points are decoupled behind swappable interfaces: the ledger runs on a PostgreSQL event-sourced implementation (or Amazon QLDB, now discontinued); storage on local disk or S3; geolocation on Mapbox, OpenStreetMap or offline lookup. Versioned REST APIs with auto-generated OpenAPI/Swagger; a documented customization framework lets countries localize without forking core logic.

Designed as national infrastructure other climate systems plug into. Ships a REST client for the Climate Action Data Trust (mapped to the CAD Trust v2 data model from release v2.1.0), so national data aggregates into the global metadata layer that prevents double counting across registries. An optional synchronization service connects to the UNDP ITMO Cooperation Platform, and a generic registry-to-registry client syncs to any peer endpoint. All functionality is exposed through versioned REST APIs with OpenAPI/Swagger and machine-account auth; AEF outputs (6/CMA.4 Annex) are directly consumable by Article 6 and national-inventory workflows.

3 live national registries (Namibia, Côte d’Ivoire, Nepal) · 6+ adoptions in progress (Sri Lanka, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Mongolia, Cambodia, Chile, Philippines, plus scoping in Ukraine, Peru, Rwanda) · full Article 6 credit lifecycle tracked in real time per deployment.

Namibia, Côte d’Ivoire, Nepal. In progress: Sri Lanka, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Mongolia, Cambodia, Chile, Philippines; scoping in Ukraine, Peru, Rwanda.

UNDP (Digital For Planet) is custodian and maintainer. National deployment at the Sri Lanka Climate Fund (Ministry of Environment) and Namibia’s Ministry of Environment, Forestry & Tourism. Developed under the Digital For Climate (D4C) collaboration, whose advisory board comprises EBRD, UNDP, the UNFCCC secretariat, IETA, the European Space Agency and the World Bank Group.

• Live demo with full Article 6 lifecycle: https://www.demo.carbreg.org/
• DPG Registry entry: https://app.digitalpublicgoods.net/a/10403
• Technical documentation, architecture and Article 6 compliance mapping: https://github.com/undp/carbon-registry
• Help/documentation site: https://nationalcarbonregistrydemo.tawk.help/
• UNDP ITMO cooperation platform: https://carboncooperation.undp.org/

• DPG Registry listing (certified Digital Public Good): https://app.digitalpublicgoods.net/a/10403
• Project site: https://carbreg.org
• Public demo instance: https://www.demo.carbreg.org/
• Source code (AGPL-3.0): https://github.com/undp/carbon-registry
• UNDP ITMO Voluntary Bilateral Cooperation Platform (integrated): https://carboncooperation.undp.org/
• Public status/uptime page: https://status.carbreg.org/
• Community of practice: https://www.sparkblue.org/group/keeping-track-digital-public-goods-paris-agreement
• Namibia national registry (government-hosted, live since COP28): https://registry.nsa.org.na
• Côte d'Ivoire national carbon registry: live since Q1 2025 (Registre carbone Côte d'Ivoire)