Nathan Rotkliffe, legal council with London-based Carbon Trade Exchange. Credit: Claudia Ciobanu/IPS

Nathan Rotkliffe is a legal council with London-based Carbon Trade Exchange. His company is aiming to develop a global platform for carbon trading in an end-to-end electronic process, initially for voluntary carbon markets.

Rotkliffe told TerraViva his company is hoping to launch the trading platform in February 2010 and that it will help ensure full transparency on the international carbon market.

“For now, we do not move into the regulated sector because of its fragmentation, but we intend to do so in the future,” Rotkliffe said.

Even though his company works on developing an electronic platform for global trade, Rotkliffe thinks that, if an agreement is reached in Copengahen, ETS (the European Unions’ Emissions Trading Mechanism) will no longer be the only regulated system, but more will emerge, for example in the US.

“I am here in Copenhagen to try to gather as much information as possible and to network with people,” he told IPS. “Everyone here wants something to happen, everyone hopes for progress, but it would be hard for me to influence negotiations since I am not at the political level.”

As for reaching out to political leaders, Rotkliffe said that “each night we are attending a climate event at the Nasa Club in central Copenhagen, where speakers come from the private sector and from the governments. It’s on every night, it costs 15 euros to get in, there are 5-6 speakers, a Q&A session and then everyone has a few drinks and talks.”