The unregulated Carbon Markets hold an unexploited potential to integrate environmental policy instruments with market solutions for rapid expansion of sustainable systems. The Carbon Markets have deployed a growing list of instruments to transition our high-polluting industries from unmeasured, unrestricted emissions to capped and regulated emissions with the long-term objective of zero-emissions. Newer, more innovative instruments will be needed to complement the current capacity of the Compulsory Market if the sustainable investments are ever to outpace the growth and necessity of unsustainable industry.
Next generation feedstocks represent an emerging market of sustainable, renewable biomasses that calculate efficient use of natural resources, solve difficult problems of unsustainable industry, and offer financial opportunity in sustainable industry. Seaweed is already on the cusp of commodity status. A novel financial instrument could dynamically engineer the expansion of the North American seaweed sector by providing the liquidity and financial activity inherent in tradeable instruments. Anchored to a carbon value a seaweed instrument could be one of a select few in a new asset class of climate finance instruments that populate the Voluntary Carbon Market (VCM) introducing robustness and integrity to the VCM and simultaneously generating the trading activity to substantiate market growth and commercial production in the US seaweed sector.