Carbon market is being pitched as a local exchange sector by the Securities and Exchange Regulator of Cambodia (SERC). Cambodia sells carbon credit abroad, creating the opportunity for creating a carbon credit trading market in the form of carbon exchange, said Sou Socheat, Director-General for the Securities and Exchange Regulator of Cambodia.

The prospect of setting up a carbon market in Cambodia should be the subject of a study between the SERC, the Asia Development Bank and Global Green Growth Insitute Cambodia (GGGI).

Sovicheat made the suggestion in a Sustainable Financing Forum last week.

The new carbon market is located in the two ASEAN countries, namely Singapore and Indonesia. “Based on experiences learnt from Singapore and Indonesia, I think that we have a foundation for conducting study (carbon market),” Sovicheat said.

SERC has been pooling efforts with the National Bank of Cambodia and concerned ministries and institutions. This is being done with

the objective of domesticating taxonomy from the ASEAN taxonomy in order to regulate and guide businesses to adhere to climate change.

“To get financing to support environment-friendly businesses, the securities market is a source of financing, providing financing to those in need, that is just the fund to restructure their businesses in line with climate change reduction,” he said.

Climate change has been made a priority issue by the Cambodian government in the Pentagon Strategy. To this end, SERC has joined hands with GGGI in a project titled “Cambodia Sustainable Bond Accelerator Program”.

With the help of this project, it is SERC’s strategy to initiate three companies issuing sustainable bonds by the year-end or next year. “The disclosure of sustainable information is to strengthen the company’s standard as well as to show the way towards sustainable business, otherwise, your business will be moving backwards,” Socheat said.

To date, CSX has facilitated listings of 20 companies, among them 11 equity firms and nine corporate bond firms. He also said that since then there have been nearly 44,000 investors opening trading accounts with CSX.

CSX, a joint venture between the Cambodian government with 55 percent of the shares and the Korean Exchange accounting for the remaining 45 percent, was started in 2012.