Technical Dialog
ICAP organizes public conferences, conducts workshops and drafts papers on important ETS design and operation issues.

ICAP dedicated several workshops and webinar to the issue of allocation, looking into various methods. A closed door, general workshop on allocation was held on November 13th 2008, in Washington DC. The workshop discussed different allocation methods and their associated challenges, with the objective of developing a common understanding of the impacts of various allocation methods on the overall functioning of the respective system. Insights from the allocation process in the EU ETS were presented.
ICAP organized a webinar to take stock of auctioning provisions in ICAP members jurisdictions on November 19th, 2009. The focus of this webinar was to identify the main design features of different auctioning systems and take an inventory of auctioning provisions in all ICAP jurisdictions.
On July 6th, 2011 a webinar on the issue of benchmarking was held by ICAP. The webinar included a presentation by Heiko Kunst, Policy Officer at the European Commission, which focused on the rationale for benchmarking, criteria for the definition of benchmarks, and EU ETS solutions to practical problems of the benchmarking approach. In September 2012, a public workshop on industrial benchmarks was jointly organized with North America 2050 (more information is available here).
ICAP hosted a closed-door workshop on competitiveness and carbon leakage on June 16th 2010 in Tokyo. The workshop provided a forum for an open and strategic discussion amongst ICAP members and selected observers on competitiveness and carbon leakage issues and to identify answers to questions such as to what extent leakage concerns are justified and which options are at hand to tackle such concerns.
On October 12th, 2011, ICAP hosted a closed-door workshop in Berlin on the topic of market oversight in an ETS. It provided the opportunity for exchanging views on different regulative approaches in related markets and their possible reference to the carbon market. The views of ICAP members on the role of market oversight and specific technical details of this issue were exchanged, with the aim of reaching a common understanding of the limitation and the scope of regulating the carbon market and of an adequate future market oversight structure.
Follow up activities included the production of a carbon market oversight primer and an ICAP webinar held in July 2012 to discuss findings and compare different approaches of individual ICAP members.
Together with the German DEHSt (Germany’s emissions trading authority) ICAP co-organized in April 2010 a webinar on CO2 monitoring and reporting within the EU Emissions Trading Scheme with a German perspective. The presentation included information on the EU ETS monitoring and reporting procedures in Germany, before a discussion on monitoring and reporting in the context of linking. Several public events were organized around the topic of Monitoring, Reporting and Verification, and generally emissions data management, see the First Global Carbon Forum 2008 on MRVCE and the ICAP China Conference 2009 on Emissions Data Management.
A workshop in Vancouver on May 19th 2009 provided a forum for discussion amongst ICAP members and observers on domestic and international offsets. Issues discussed included the rationale behind offsets, the experiences at hand with regard to different types of offsets, what monitoring issues can arise in the context of offsets, and the possible effects of different regulations on offsets on future linking of cap and trade systems.
Two webinars were subsequently organized in June 2009. The first regarded the role of CDM and sectoral crediting mechanism following the negotiations in Bonn. The second webinar focused on California’s plans for international offsets and sectoral agreements with China.
A second closed-door workshop under the title “Offsets revisited” was hosted by ICAP on November 17th, 2010 in Sacramento, CA. Given the dynamics and importance of this topic at the time, also with regard to possible linking of ETS, ICAP decided to devote another internal workshop to offsets in order to discuss new developments in ICAP member and observer jurisdictions as well as the debate in the UN negotiations and other multilateral fora.