The Multi-Buyer Problem: What Happens When Ghana and Peru Have More Sovereign Customers Than Credits?
For the first few years of Article 6.2, the sovereign credit market was essentially a one-buyer show. Switzerland, through the KliK Foundation, signed bilateral agreements, funded projects, and completed the world's first ITMO transfer from Thailand in early 2024. Everyone else watched, took notes, and moved slowly.
That's changing fast. Singapore has now contracted nature-based carbon credits from four projects across three countries, including the Kwahu Landscape Restoration Project in Ghana and two REDD+ initiatives in Peru. The deal is worth roughly S$76 million and covers 2026 through 2030. Both Ghana and Peru are also Swiss Article 6.2 bilateral partners where KliK has active procurement pipelines.
And they won't be the last. Germany's coalition agreement includes provisions to use Article 6 credits toward national climate targets. Japan's GX-ETS, which goes mandatory in April, accepts JCM credits for compliance. The UNDP is running an open call for project developers in several of the same countries. The demand side of Article 6 is suddenly crowded.
The NDC Math Gets Complicated
Here's the structural issue that nobody is talking about enough: every ITMO transferred to a buyer country requires a corresponding adjustment on the seller's side. Ghana adds those emissions back to its national balance sheet. Peru does the same. The more credits they sell, the harder it becomes to meet their own Nationally Determined Contributions.
Most host countries set their Article 6 authorization frameworks with a single buyer in mind. They calculated how many credits they could transfer without blowing up their NDC targets. Multi-buyer demand changes that equation. A country that planned to sell 5 million tonnes to Switzerland now has Singapore, Germany, and potentially Japan all competing for a share of the same mitigation outcomes.
KliK Foundation's pipeline sits at roughly 20 million ITMOs across Switzerland's bilateral partners, purchased at an estimated average of nearly $40 per tonne. That price point is becoming the de facto Article 6.2 benchmark. But with more buyers in the market, host countries have pricing leverage they didn't have two years ago.
What This Means for Pricing
Competition typically pushes prices up, and there's no reason the ITMO market would be different. Host countries with strong institutional frameworks and multiple interested buyers can afford to be selective. Ghana's EPA has experience navigating Article 6 requirements. Peru's MINAM has been running bilateral projects for years. Both are well-positioned to negotiate better terms.
For project developers, this is mostly good news. Multi-buyer demand means more off-take certainty, which improves project bankability and makes it easier to secure upfront financing. But it also means developers need to understand the authorization constraints in each host country. Selling credits to Singapore might preclude selling to Switzerland from the same project if the host country's authorization capacity is limited.
The dMRV Angle
Multi-buyer procurement creates a practical need for standardized, transparent, and continuous monitoring. When Switzerland is the only buyer, bilateral quality assurance processes can be customized. When three or four sovereign buyers are procuring from the same host country, each with their own verification requirements, the monitoring overhead multiplies.
Digital MRV solves this by creating a single, auditable data stream that multiple buyers can access. Sensor-to-certificate pipelines don't care who the end buyer is. The data is the data. For host countries managing relationships with multiple sovereign customers, dMRV isn't a nice-to-have anymore. It's infrastructure.
Where This Goes Next
Watch for host countries to start setting formal allocation policies. Some may adopt first-come-first-served models. Others might auction credits to the highest bidder or reserve capacity for preferred partners. The UNDP's CfP expansion in 2026 will add more structure to this, but the competitive dynamics are already playing out in real procurement decisions.
For TrustVal and others building the technology layer for Article 6, the multi-buyer trend validates the need for robust, interoperable monitoring systems. The market is moving beyond pilot-scale bilateral projects. What comes next requires infrastructure that can serve multiple stakeholders from a single source of truth.