Dubai, March 4 The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) has signed a MoU with the Qatar-based Global Carbon Council (GCC) to establish India's first digital carbon marketplace for household and livelihood-based clean energy projects.
TERI is a research institute in New Delhi that specializes in the fields of energy, environment, and sustainable development.
The initiative aims to enable community-scale projects to participate in high-integrity international carbon markets by converting small, household-level clean energy actions into measurable, verified, and tradable carbon credits and to avail carbon finance for projects benefiting poor communities.
The partnership will unlock carbon finance for distributed renewable energy solutions such as solar lighting, clean cooking technologies, and productive-use appliances in rural and underserved communities across India.
Under the agreement, the partners will jointly explore the development of a fully digital Energy Access and Carbon Marketplace or integrate TERI's flagship LaBL 2.0 (Lighting a Billion Livelihoods) projects into GCC's World Bank-supported ASCENT Energy Access Portal.
The proposed platform will allow aggregation of household and small-business projects to generate carbon credits through digital Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification (MRV) systems, aimed at lowering transaction costs while ensuring transparency, traceability, and environmental integrity from project registration to credit issuance and retirement.
The collaboration is intended to provide a new pathway for channeling carbon finance to clean energy projects benefiting low-income communities and supporting livelihood generation across India.
The MoU was formalized by Yousef Alhorr, GCC Founding Chairman, and Vibha Dhawan, TERI Director General.