The MVC Colombia initiative — a voluntary mechanism for reducing greenhouse gas emissions — was a landmark project in Colombia's climate finance history. Led by Fundación Natura and supported by the Global Environment Facility (GEF) through the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), I led the market development effort from the perspective of the Colombian Commodity Exchange (Bolsa Mercantil de Colombia, BMC).
Project Overview
MVC Colombia was designed to establish a technological and institutional platform for voluntary emission reduction activities, structured around three pillars:
- Market Platform — A national trading infrastructure for Verified Emission Reductions (VERs), including a registry interface, information system, and transactional mechanism built on the BMC.
- Carbon Forestry Projects — Development, validation, and independent verification of VERs from a portfolio of Colombian forestry projects.
- Capacity Building — Training for project developers, verifiers, and market participants to build the human capital a functioning voluntary carbon market requires.
Why It Mattered
At the time, Colombia lacked a domestic venue for trading voluntary carbon credits. Domestic forest and land-use projects with genuine mitigation value had no reliable pathway to monetize those reductions — meaning the economic incentive to invest in nature-based solutions simply wasn't there at scale.
By anchoring the mechanism to an existing, regulated commodity exchange, the project leveraged institutional credibility and operational infrastructure that a standalone carbon registry would have taken years to build. It was a model of pragmatic market design: use what exists, fill the gaps, and create the conditions for private capital to follow.
Legacy
The MVC Colombia experience demonstrated that voluntary carbon markets can be built in emerging economies with the right institutional backing — and that commodity exchanges are natural homes for environmental product markets. The lessons informed subsequent carbon market discussions in Colombia and contributed to the regional policy conversation ahead of post-Paris Agreement implementation.