Access carbon market data in R. Emissions trading system prices and verified emissions, voluntary carbon credit registrations and retirements, and global carbon pricing data from compliance and voluntary markets worldwide.

Carbon pricing has gone from a niche instrument to a systemic part of global climate policy. Around 12 billion tonnes of CO2-equivalent are now covered by some form of carbon price, about 24% of global emissions. The EU ETS alone prices ~40% of EU emissions and generates roughly EUR 40 billion a year in auction revenue. Voluntary carbon markets have issued over 2 billion credits since 1996, and Article 6 of the Paris Agreement is bringing a new wave of international carbon trading online.

The catch is that the data is scattered across dozens of jurisdictions, agencies, and registries, each with its own format, access pattern, and quirks:

• EU ETS publishes verified emissions and allocations via the DG CLIMA Union Registry as XLSX files with year-specific UUIDs, and auction prices via EEX as per-year XLSX reports
• UK Emissions Trading Registry publishes compliance and allocation reports as XLSX, with date-stamped filenames that change on every republication
• RGGI publishes per-state allowance distributions as XLSX on a stable year-parameterised URL, but clearing prices only as per-auction PDFs
• California Air Resources Board serves auction prices and caps as stable CSVs from ww2.arb.ca.gov
• ICAP Allowance Price Explorer exposes cross-ETS prices via an undocumented but stable JSON endpoint
• World Bank Carbon Pricing Dashboard publishes an XLSX twice a year, with a filename that encodes the release date
• RFF World Carbon Pricing Database lives on GitHub as per-country CSVs in version-stamped folders
• Berkeley VROD aggregates five voluntary registries into a bimonthly XLSX release
• CarbonPlan OffsetsDB maintains daily parquet snapshots of voluntary credits in a public S3 bucket (the REST API was deprecated in 2026)

carbondata wraps the stable, free, API-accessible sources through a consistent R interface, handling URL resolution, caching, and schema normalisation so you can get on with the analysis.

install.packages("carbondata")

# Or install the development version from GitHub
# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("charlescoverdale/carbondata")

All sources are free. None require registration for v0.1.0 functionality.

library(carbondata)

# All supported markets at a glance
co2_markets()

# Latest EU ETS auction prices
prices <- co2_euets_price(from = "2024-01-01")
head(prices)

# Verified emissions for large German installations, 2022
emissions <- co2_euets_emissions(country = "DE", year = 2022)

# Cross-market price comparison
icap <- co2_icap_prices(jurisdiction = c("EU ETS", "UK ETS", "RGGI"))

# Voluntary forestry projects registered with Verra
verra_forestry <- co2_vrod(registry = "Verra", project_type = "Forestry")

One chart, four compliance markets, 20 years of data.

library(carbondata)

icap <- co2_icap_prices(
  jurisdiction = c("EU ETS", "UK ETS", "RGGI", "California"),
  from = "2005-01-01"
)

plot(icap$date, icap$price_usd, col = factor(icap$jurisdiction),
     xlab = "", ylab = "USD / tCO2e", pch = 20)
legend("topleft", legend = levels(factor(icap$jurisdiction)),
       col = seq_len(nlevels(factor(icap$jurisdiction))), pch = 20)

Compliance markets (EU ETS) trade around USD 70/tCO2. Nature-based voluntary credits trade around USD 5/tCO2. Why the gap?

# EU ETS average 2024 price
eu <- co2_euets_price(from = "2024-01-01", to = "2024-12-31")
mean(eu$price_eur, na.rm = TRUE)
#> [1] ~65

# Average Verra credit issuance across forestry projects
vrod <- co2_vrod(registry = "Verra", project_type = "Forestry")
summary(vrod$total_issuances)

Downloads are cached to tools::R_user_dir("carbondata", "cache") by default. Subsequent calls are instant. Override the location with options(carbondata.cache_dir = "/path/to/dir"). Use co2_clear_cache() to remove cached files.

Report bugs or request features at GitHub Issues.

carbon markets, emissions trading, EU ETS, UK ETS, RGGI, California Cap-and-Trade, Verra, Gold Standard, ICAP, World Bank carbon pricing, voluntary carbon markets, climate finance, CO2, greenhouse gas, sustainability disclosure, TCFD, CSRD, SFDR, ISSB