LAUNCH | South Africa Launches Market for Carbon Credits and Renewable Energy Certificates on Xpansiv Immutable Ledger

South Africa’s Johannesburg Stock Exchange(JSE) has launched a new carbon market that will allow local participants to buy or sell carbon credits and renewable energy certificates.

According to the JSE, the market has been launched in collaboration with Xpansiv, an infrastructure provider for global environmental markets under a separate legal entity called JSE Ventures. Xpansiv provides environmental market technology including registry infrastructure, market data, and portfolio management platforms.

Within the new market, customers will have the ability to advance their sustainability goals as they will have full access to the functionality of the global Xpansiv platform. This includes features for:

• Spot trading
• Auctions
• Requests for quotes

for both carbon offsets and renewable energy certificates.

“There is a heightened global focus on carbon markets and we saw this as an opportunity to bring an innovative solution to our market participants while positioning South Africa as a significant contributor to decarbonisation,” says Leila Fourie, JSE Group CEO.

“An exciting aspect of operating the global environmental markets infrastructure is partnering with leaders like the JSE to enable new marketplaces to scale the energy transition and efficiently support climate finance,” said John Melby, CEO, Xpansiv.

“We look forward to working with the exceptional JSE team to promptly deliver a world-class carbon and renewable energy marketplace in Africa and to enabling new regional products and initiatives to thrive as the continent steps up its global climate ambition.”

According to the JSE, South Africa is the 12th highest emitter of carbon globally and has an increasing need for access and supply of carbon credits.

A South African voluntary carbon market will:

• Accelerate the creation of carbon offset projects
• Help meet the demand for credits by emitters seeking to offset their emissions
• Increase investment interest in the country, and
• Contribute meaningfully to helping grow the economy and improve sustainability practices

“This initiative is suited to market participants that have identified clear sustainability commitments, particularly towards net-zero. We look forward to engaging with them on the platform’s range of environmental offerings.” adds Fourie.

“Our aim is to promote transparency in an evolving landscape for environmental investment. We hope to do this while expediting potential funding mechanisms for these projects.” concludes Fourie.

In 2020, the JSE struck a deal with GlobaCap, a market leader in private capital markets automation, to launch a private placement decentralized platform for infrastructure projects across Africa.

The agreement would also see the launch of an SME funding market in South Africa. According to Globacap, this would be a crowdfunding platform for SMEs looking to raise capital in a true private sense.

About Xpansiv


Xpansiv’s® rules-based markets and infrastructure enable stakeholders to deliver transparent, credible, and auditable environmental claims to address the growing global demand for assurance and accountability on climate action and sustainability performance.

Xpansiv has developed standardized assets that mirror physical commodities, enabling marketplace liquidity for registered environmental performance claims. Standardized assets include consensus-built environmental performance and origin attributes needed to value and transact claims across the fuels value chain on immutable ledgers. These environmental-performance claims are grounded in empirical, verified data traceable back to the source.