World Bank Carbon Pricing Dashboard
Almost every claim about how much of the world’s carbon is priced, how much revenue carbon pricing raises, or whether a jurisdiction’s price is “high” traces back to one source — yet most people citing “the World Bank says 28% of emissions are covered” cannot say what that figure counts, what it excludes, or why the price on the dashboard is not what any given company actually pays.
The Carbon Pricing Dashboard is the authoritative global record of direct carbon pricing, and reading its numbers without reading its definitions is how good data produces bad analysis.
The World Bank Carbon Pricing Dashboard is the authoritative interactive tracker of direct carbon pricing worldwide — emissions trading systems, carbon taxes, and crediting mechanisms. Maintained by the World Bank with ICAP, it publishes instrument counts, emissions coverage, prices, and revenue, and underpins the annual State and Trends of Carbon Pricing report.
Executive Summary
The World Bank Carbon Pricing Dashboard — formally the State and Trends of Carbon Pricing Dashboard — is the single most-cited global record of direct carbon pricing. It is an interactive online tool, maintained by the World Bank Group with the International Carbon Action Partnership (ICAP), that tracks every implemented and emerging emissions trading system, carbon tax, and carbon crediting mechanism worldwide, and reports their emissions coverage, price, and revenue. It is the data backbone of the World Bank’s annual State and Trends of Carbon Pricing report.
It is a reference tool, not a certification standard. It does not accredit projects, issue credits, or set requirements. What it does is define, classify, and quantify the global carbon-pricing landscape on a consistent basis — which is precisely why the figures it produces carry authority, and why misreading its definitions produces misleading analysis. The most consequential distinction for any user is that the dashboard tracks direct carbon pricing (an explicit price on emissions), and its headline “price” is a nominal rate on a given date, not the effective cost any particular company bears.
It is: the authoritative tracker of ETSs, carbon taxes, and crediting mechanisms; the source for global coverage, price, and revenue figures; the data layer behind the State and Trends report. It is not: a carbon credit registry, a corporate disclosure framework, a measure of what a firm actually pays, or a record of indirect carbon pricing such as fuel excise taxes.
Provider directory
Now it has to hold up all year.
See who does this work. Every listing names the standards it works to, and paid placements are labelled. Including Anthesis Group and Small World Consulting.
Browse 6 carbon accounting & inventory providers →Do this work? A listing is US$390 a year. Get listed →
What Is the Carbon Pricing Dashboard?
The Carbon Pricing Dashboard is an interactive platform that provides the latest information on existing and emerging direct carbon pricing initiatives around the world. It is aimed at policymakers, businesses, and researchers, and it is structured into two main sections: compliance instruments (ETSs and carbon taxes) and carbon crediting markets (crediting mechanisms and Article 6 cooperative approaches).
Each section is broken into a set of dedicated views. Under compliance instruments, the dashboard exposes instrument-by-instrument detail, greenhouse-gas emissions coverage, price, and revenue. Under carbon crediting markets, it exposes crediting-mechanism detail, credit issuance, and participation in cooperative approaches under Article 6.2 of the Paris Agreement. A world map lets users see, for any year from 1990 onward, where compliance and crediting instruments are implemented, and jurisdiction factsheets provide the design detail behind each instrument.
The dashboard and the annual report are two faces of the same knowledge product. The report is the analytical narrative published once a year; the dashboard is the continuously updated, queryable dataset that sits underneath it. When a source says “the World Bank says,” it is almost always drawing on one of these two.
Why It Exists
Carbon pricing is fragmented across dozens of jurisdictions, each with its own instrument design, sectoral scope, price level, and revenue treatment. Before a common reference existed, comparing them was near-impossible: a “carbon price” in one country covered power only, in another covered industry and transport, in a third was an intensity benchmark rather than an absolute cap. Coverage figures, price comparisons, and revenue totals were not computed on a shared basis, so cross-jurisdiction claims were unreliable.
The dashboard exists to close that gap. It applies consistent definitions — what counts as a compliance instrument, when an instrument is “implemented,” how emissions coverage is calculated — across every jurisdiction, so that the resulting global figures are genuinely comparable. It converts a patchwork of national policies into a single, structured, longitudinal dataset that researchers can cite, policymakers can benchmark against, and businesses can use to understand their carbon-cost exposure.
A carbon-pricing statistic is only as trustworthy as the definitions behind it. The dashboard’s value is that its definitions are explicit and applied uniformly. A figure lifted from the dashboard without its definitional context — “28% of emissions are priced” — invites exactly the cross-jurisdiction errors the dashboard was built to prevent.
Governance: Who Builds and Maintains It
The dashboard is maintained by the World Bank Group, with the International Carbon Action Partnership (ICAP) supporting the compliance-instrument data. It is supported by the World Bank’s Partnership for Market Implementation (PMI) — a ten-year programme, with a US$250 million capitalisation target, that helps countries design, pilot, and implement carbon-pricing instruments aligned with their development priorities.
The companion State and Trends report is produced by a World Bank task team with analytical support from Climate Focus, and draws on data contributions from a range of market-data partners — including ICAP for compliance systems and, for carbon crediting, providers such as Ecosystem Marketplace, S&P Global Commodity Insights, AlliedOffsets, and the Institute for Climate Economics. This distributed data sourcing is why the dashboard can be comprehensive across both the compliance and voluntary sides of the market.
The dashboard is verified information updated on a regular basis, published under a Creative Commons Attribution licence. Its authority rests on the combination of the World Bank’s neutral convening role, ICAP’s compliance-market expertise, and a transparent, citable methodology.
Publication Cadence and the State and Trends Report
Two products, two rhythms. The dashboard is updated continuously as instruments are adopted, amended, or repealed. The State and Trends of Carbon Pricing report is published annually — the 2026 edition is the thirteenth in the current format, in a series the World Bank has run since 2003.
The annual report is the moment the year’s changes are consolidated into a narrative: which instruments launched, which prices moved, how coverage and revenue shifted, and what the emerging pipeline looks like. Because the dashboard moves continuously and the report is a snapshot, a well-sourced carbon-pricing claim should cite the specific edition or the dashboard access date — figures shift between them.
Carbon-pricing figures date quickly. An instrument count, a coverage percentage, or a revenue total is a snapshot tied to a specific report edition and a specific dashboard year. Any “the World Bank says…” claim without an edition year or access date should be treated as undated until verified — instruments are added, amended, and occasionally repealed every year.
What the Dashboard Measures: Direct Carbon Pricing
The dashboard’s scope is direct carbon pricing: mechanisms that put an explicit price on greenhouse-gas emissions. This is the definitional boundary that determines what is in and out of every headline figure, and it is the boundary most often misunderstood.
Direct carbon pricing puts an explicit price on emissions, typically through a carbon tax (a set price per tonne of CO2e) or an emissions trading system (a market price set by a cap on allowances). The dashboard also tracks carbon crediting mechanisms — programmes that issue tradable credits for emission reductions or removals — as a distinct category alongside the two compliance instruments.
The World Bank’s stated rationale for tracking direct carbon pricing is that it aligns the cost of emitting with the social cost of doing so, creating an economic incentive to shift investment, production, and consumption toward lower-carbon options, while raising revenue more efficiently than distortive alternatives such as labour taxes.
Direct vs Indirect Carbon Pricing
This distinction is the single most important thing to understand before quoting any dashboard figure. The dashboard tracks direct carbon pricing only. It does not track indirect carbon pricing — most importantly, fuel excise taxes.
| Dimension | Direct carbon pricing (in scope) | Indirect carbon pricing (out of scope) |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | An explicit price per tonne of CO2e — carbon taxes and ETSs | Taxes that raise the cost of carbon without an explicit per-tonne price — chiefly fuel excise duties |
| On the dashboard? | Yes | No |
| Effect on “coverage” figure | Counts toward the % of emissions priced | Excluded — so real-world carbon costs are higher than the dashboard’s coverage implies |
| Typical alternative source | World Bank dashboard / State and Trends report | OECD Effective Carbon Rates (which combines direct and indirect) |
Because fuel excise taxes are excluded, the dashboard’s coverage figure understates the total carbon-related price signal in an economy. For a fuller picture that includes indirect pricing, the OECD’s Effective Carbon Rates series is the complementary reference. The two are measuring different things by design — do not treat them as competing versions of the same number.
The Core Taxonomy
The dashboard organises the world into three instrument families. Understanding the differences is prerequisite to reading any figure, because coverage, price, and revenue behave differently across them.
| Instrument | How the price is set | Certainty it provides | Dashboard section |
|---|---|---|---|
| Emissions trading system (ETS) | Market price, set by supply and demand for a capped quantity of allowances | Quantity certainty (the cap); price varies | Compliance instruments |
| Carbon tax | A fixed price per tonne, set by government | Price certainty; emissions outcome varies | Compliance instruments |
| Crediting mechanism | Credits issued for verified reductions/removals; price set in credit markets | Neither a cap nor a fixed price — a project-based instrument | Carbon crediting markets |
ETSs and carbon taxes are compliance instruments: they impose an obligation on covered emitters. Crediting mechanisms are a different animal — they generate tradable units that may or may not be usable within a compliance system, depending on the jurisdiction. The dashboard keeps them in separate sections precisely because conflating them is the most common structural error in carbon-pricing analysis.
The Compliance Instruments Section
The compliance side of the dashboard covers ETSs and carbon taxes, and exposes four views. Each answers a different question a policymaker or analyst brings to the data.
| View | Question it answers |
|---|---|
| Instrument detail | What instruments exist, where, and with what design attributes (sectors, gases, thresholds)? |
| GHG emissions coverage | What share of a jurisdiction’s — and the world’s — emissions falls under a price? |
| Price | What is the nominal price per tonne of CO2e, by instrument, over time? |
| Revenue | How much public revenue does each instrument raise? |
These four views map directly onto the four things a jurisdiction most wants to know about carbon pricing: what to adopt, how much it would cover, what it would cost emitters, and what it would raise. The EU ETS, the UK ETS, and national carbon taxes such as the Singapore Carbon Tax each appear here with their own factsheet.
Emissions Trading Systems
An emissions trading system caps the total quantity of emissions from covered sectors and issues a corresponding quantity of tradable allowances. Emitters must surrender one allowance per tonne emitted; the market sets the price. Because the cap fixes the quantity, an ETS delivers certainty over the emissions outcome, while the price fluctuates with demand, economic activity, and policy signals.
The dashboard records ETSs at national and subnational levels. The EU ETS is the largest and most mature, and the dashboard tracks major developments such as China’s national ETS expanding beyond the power sector into cement, steel, and aluminium — a change that materially moved global coverage. Not all ETSs use an absolute cap: some emerging systems, including India’s framework, use benchmark-based intensity limits rather than a hard emissions ceiling, and the dashboard captures those design distinctions in the instrument-detail view.
Carbon Taxes
A carbon tax sets a fixed price per tonne of CO2e, giving emitters price certainty while leaving the emissions outcome to respond to that price. Governments favour carbon taxes where price predictability, administrative simplicity, or the absence of the market infrastructure an ETS requires make a fixed price the more practical instrument.
The dashboard tracks carbon taxes at national and subnational levels — from long-standing national taxes to subnational instruments such as the recent Mexican state carbon taxes. It records the same design attributes it records for ETSs: covered sectors, covered gases, the rate, and coverage. Many jurisdictions run a carbon tax and an ETS in parallel, or layer one on the other, and the dashboard’s instrument-level structure keeps those combinations distinct. Corporate exposure to a carbon tax can be modelled with the GreenCalculus carbon tax liability calculator.
The Carbon Crediting Markets Section
The crediting side of the dashboard is structurally separate from compliance, and covers three views: crediting-mechanism detail, credit issuance, and participation in cooperative approaches under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement.
| View | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Instrument detail | The crediting mechanisms that exist — international, independent, and governmental — and their design. |
| Issuance | The volume of credits issued to emission-reduction activities, mapped by host country and mechanism (tCO2e). |
| Cooperative approaches | Participation in Article 6.2 cooperative approaches — the country-to-country transfer of mitigation outcomes. |
The crediting section tracks the supply and governance of credits — issuance volumes and the mechanisms behind them. It is not a credit registry: it does not hold individual credit serial numbers or record retirements at project level. For project-level integrity and claims, the relevant references are the ICVCM Core Carbon Principles and the VCMI Claims Code of Practice, and standard bodies such as Verra and the Gold Standard.
Crediting Mechanisms: International, Independent, Governmental
The dashboard classifies crediting mechanisms into three governance types, a distinction that matters because it determines who authorises a credit and where it can be used.
| Type | Who runs it | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| International | Established under international treaty or body | The Paris Agreement Article 6.4 mechanism; the legacy Clean Development Mechanism |
| Independent | Private, non-governmental standard bodies | Verra’s VCS, the Gold Standard |
| Governmental | National or subnational governments | Domestic crediting programmes run by individual jurisdictions |
The dashboard counts governmental crediting mechanisms among its implemented instruments, alongside ETSs and carbon taxes, and tracks issuance across all three governance types. The three-way split is how the dashboard distinguishes, for example, a nationally administered crediting scheme from an independent voluntary-market standard operating in the same country.
Article 6 Cooperative Approaches
Article 6 of the Paris Agreement lets countries cooperate to meet their nationally determined contributions (NDCs) through the transfer of mitigation outcomes. The dashboard tracks participation in these cooperative approaches, reflecting one of the fastest-moving frontiers of the carbon market.
- Article 6.2 governs bilateral and multilateral cooperative approaches — one country transfers Internationally Transferred Mitigation Outcomes (ITMOs) to another, which counts them toward its NDC. The dashboard’s cooperative-approaches view tracks which countries are participating.
- Article 6.4 establishes a centralised international crediting mechanism, supervised under the UNFCCC — the successor architecture to the Clean Development Mechanism — which the dashboard tracks among international crediting mechanisms.
Article 6 readiness and the number of authorised cooperative approaches have grown rapidly, and the dashboard is the closest thing to a single tracker of who is participating. Because the accounting has to avoid double-counting a transferred outcome (through “corresponding adjustments”), Article 6 is also where compliance and crediting most directly intersect — and where the dashboard’s separation of the two sections is most useful.
Key Metrics and How They Are Defined
The dashboard surfaces four headline metrics. Each has a precise definition, and each is routinely misread. The table sets out what each metric counts.
| Metric | Definition | Common misreading |
|---|---|---|
| Number of instruments | Count of implemented compliance instruments (ETSs + carbon taxes), and separately of crediting mechanisms | Adding compliance and crediting counts into one “total” without noting the mix |
| % of global emissions covered | Share of global GHG emissions subject to a direct carbon price | Reading it as the share paying a meaningful price, or as including fuel taxes |
| Global revenue | Public revenue raised by carbon taxes and ETS allowance sales | Treating it as the total value of the carbon market (it excludes secondary trading and credit sales) |
| Price | Nominal price per tCO2e for each instrument on a given date | Reading it as the effective cost a specific company pays |
The “Implemented” Classification Rule
The dashboard’s headline instrument count depends entirely on one definition: what counts as “implemented.” Getting this rule right is the difference between an accurate count and an inflated one.
- Compliance instruments (ETSs, carbon taxes) are considered implemented once they have been formally adopted through legislation and compliance obligations are in force and enforced. A legislated-but-not-yet-in-force instrument is scheduled or under development, not implemented.
- Crediting mechanisms are considered implemented once they have issued credits — or have a framework in place that allows credits to be used domestically (for example, South Africa’s arrangement).
This is why the dashboard distinguishes “implemented,” “scheduled for implementation,” and “under consideration.” A jurisdiction announcing an ETS does not move the implemented count until the obligation is live. Analysts who count announced or planned instruments as implemented overstate the state of play — the dashboard’s own classification is the guard against that.
“Under development” is not “implemented.” Large economies including Brazil, India, and Türkiye have been developing ETSs; until their obligations are in force and enforced, they sit in the pipeline, not in the implemented count. Cite the implemented figure and the pipeline separately — conflating them is a frequent error in secondary coverage.
How Coverage Is Calculated
The coverage metric — the headline “share of global emissions under a carbon price” — is computed by mapping each instrument’s covered sectors and gases to the emissions in those sectors, then aggregating across jurisdictions against global GHG emissions. Three features of the method shape how the figure should be read.
- It is sector- and gas-specific. An instrument covering only power counts only power-sector emissions, not the whole economy. This is why coverage varies so sharply by sector — over half of power-sector emissions are priced, while agriculture remains largely unpriced.
- It counts direct pricing only. Fuel excise taxes are excluded, so the figure is a floor on the total carbon price signal.
- It avoids double-counting overlaps. Where a carbon tax and an ETS both apply to the same emissions, the coverage method accounts for the overlap rather than counting those emissions twice.
Coverage has roughly doubled over the past decade, driven by new instruments and by expansions of existing systems — most visibly China’s national ETS extending into heavy industry. The sectoral breakdown, not the single global percentage, is what a serious analyst reads.
How Price Is Reported — and What It Is Not
The price view reports the nominal price per tonne of CO2e for each instrument — the carbon-tax rate, or the market allowance price for an ETS — typically as of a reference date. This is the metric most often misused, because the dashboard price is not the effective carbon cost any specific emitter bears.
Several features drive a wedge between the headline price and a firm’s actual cost: free allowance allocation in ETSs, exemptions and rebates in carbon taxes, partial sectoral coverage, and the overlap of multiple instruments. A jurisdiction with a high headline price can impose a low effective cost on a given emitter — and vice versa. Never quote the dashboard price as “what emitters pay.”
The dashboard reports prices in nominal terms on a common currency basis for comparability. To understand the effective rate an emitter faces, an analyst has to layer in allocation, exemptions, and coverage — which is precisely the work an internal carbon price or a marginal abatement cost analysis does. The dashboard gives the sticker price; the effective price is a downstream calculation.
How Revenue Is Reported
The revenue metric captures the public revenue raised by carbon taxes and by the sale of ETS allowances. It is a fiscal figure — money flowing to government budgets — not a measure of the total value transacted in carbon markets.
- It excludes secondary-market trading. Allowances and credits traded between private parties after issuance do not appear in the revenue figure.
- It reflects both price and coverage. Revenue falls when large-ETS prices soften even if coverage grows — as happened when EU and UK allowance prices eased.
- Its use is tracked too. The report notes how revenue is earmarked, with a substantial share directed toward environment, infrastructure, and development projects.
Revenue has risen several-fold over the past decade in real terms, mobilising over US$100 billion annually for public budgets — a figure the World Bank frames as evidence that carbon pricing is also a significant, relatively efficient fiscal instrument.
Headline Findings and Trajectory
The figures below are drawn from the most recent State and Trends editions and are, by construction, point-in-time snapshots. They should be cited with their edition year.
The decade-scale trend is the more durable story: instruments have grown from fewer than 10 in 2005 to around 80 today; coverage has expanded from roughly 12% to nearly 30%; average prices have close to doubled; and revenue has tripled in real terms. All large middle-income economies have now implemented or are planning direct carbon pricing. On the crediting side, the 2026 edition reports credit issuances rising 8% from 2024 to 2025, with price premiums persisting for higher-integrity forest and reforestation credits and for credits eligible for international aviation.
The illustrative chart below traces the long-run growth in the number of implemented compliance instruments — the trajectory that anchors the dashboard’s narrative of steady, sticky adoption.
| Year | instruments |
|---|---|
| 2005 | 9.00 instruments |
| 2010 | 20.0 instruments |
| 2015 | 38.0 instruments |
| 2020 | 58.0 instruments |
| 2023 | 73.0 instruments |
| 2024 | 75.0 instruments |
| 2025 | 80.0 instruments |
Instrument counts, coverage, and revenue change every edition. The 2025 edition reported ~80 instruments and ~28% coverage; the 2026 edition frames coverage as nearly 30% across a larger set of implemented policies. Always cite the edition. The figures on this page reflect the 2025 and 2026 editions as of the review date above.
The Price Gap and the High-Level Commission Corridor
The dashboard’s price data supports one of the most-cited findings in climate policy: most carbon prices are too low. The reference benchmark is the corridor identified by the High-Level Commission on Carbon Prices — broadly US$40–80 per tonne of CO2e (rising over time) as the range consistent with the Paris Agreement’s temperature goals.
Against that benchmark, the dashboard shows a persistent gap. The modal price across jurisdictions remains well below the corridor, with only a small minority of jurisdictions pricing above it, and the emissions-weighted global average price sitting far below any single high-price jurisdiction. A handful of countries price at or above US$100 per tonne; most price a fraction of that.
Carbon pricing has two distinct shortfalls, and the dashboard measures both. The coverage gap is that most global emissions are still unpriced. The price gap is that most priced emissions carry a price below the level science and economics suggest is needed. A jurisdiction can close one without closing the other — high coverage at a low price, or a high price on a narrow base. Serious analysis reads both.
How to Use the Dashboard
For an analyst approaching the dashboard for the first time, the practical workflow runs as follows.
- Choose the section. Compliance (ETSs and carbon taxes) or carbon crediting markets — they are structurally separate and answer different questions.
- Pick the view. Instrument detail, coverage, price, or revenue on the compliance side; instrument detail, issuance, or cooperative approaches on the crediting side.
- Set the year. The map and charts are year-scoped from 1990 onward — set the year before reading any figure, and note it in any citation.
- Read the factsheet. For any instrument, open its jurisdiction factsheet for design attributes: covered sectors, gases, thresholds, price, and revenue.
- Check the classification. Confirm whether an instrument is implemented, scheduled, or under consideration before counting it.
- Download for analysis. Export the underlying data to Excel for jurisdiction- or sector-level work rather than reading figures off the charts.
Turn a jurisdiction’s headline price into an actual exposure figure for your operations.
Data Downloads, Licence, and Reuse
The dashboard’s underlying dataset is downloadable as an Excel workbook, and the State and Trends report is published under a Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC BY), which permits reuse with attribution. This open-data posture is a large part of why the dashboard has become the default citation across academic, policy, and commercial analysis.
Two practical points for reuse. First, cite the specific edition or dashboard access date — the data is longitudinal and versioned by year, so an undated figure is unreliable. Second, when reusing the coverage, price, or revenue figures, carry their definitions with them: a coverage percentage without the “direct pricing only” caveat, or a price without the “nominal, not effective” caveat, is an incomplete citation that invites misreading downstream.
How It Informs Corporate Carbon-Cost Analysis
The dashboard is not a corporate accounting tool, but it is a foundational input to several corporate analyses. Used correctly, it tells a company where and at what nominal level its emissions are exposed to a direct carbon price.
- Carbon-cost exposure mapping. A multinational can use the coverage and price views to identify which of its operating jurisdictions price carbon, in which sectors, and at what nominal rate — the starting point for a cost-of-carbon assessment.
- Internal carbon pricing. Firms setting an internal carbon price often benchmark it against the dashboard’s observed prices and the High-Level Commission corridor. The dashboard supplies the external anchor; the internal carbon price calculator applies it.
- Border-adjustment exposure. As border mechanisms such as the EU CBAM and the UK CBAM reference the carbon price paid in the country of production, the dashboard’s price data helps exporters anticipate their adjustment liability.
- Scenario and transition-risk analysis. Carbon-price trajectories feed transition-risk modelling, complementing forward-looking pathways such as the NGFS climate scenarios.
The dashboard sits upstream of corporate carbon accounting. It tells a company what direct carbon prices exist and at what nominal level — it does not tell the company what it will pay, which depends on allocation, exemptions, and coverage specific to its installations. Use the dashboard to scope exposure; use instrument-specific calculators to quantify liability.
Relationship to CBAM, ETS, and Carbon-Tax Standards
The dashboard is the map; the individual instruments are the territory. It records the existence and design of the instruments that other references document in depth.
| Instrument / mechanism | Role relative to the dashboard |
|---|---|
| EU ETS / UK ETS | Individual compliance instruments recorded and priced on the dashboard’s compliance side. |
| EU CBAM / UK CBAM | Border mechanisms that reference the carbon price paid in the country of production — the price the dashboard reports. |
| Australian Safeguard Mechanism | A baseline-and-credit compliance instrument tracked among implemented instruments. |
| CORSIA | An international mechanism whose eligible credits attract a dashboard-observed price premium. |
| ICVCM / VCMI | Integrity and claims frameworks for the credits whose issuance the dashboard tracks. |
Common Misinterpretations
Six high-frequency misreadings of the dashboard — the kind that make their way into corporate strategy decks, media coverage, and policy briefs.
It tracks the existence, design, and issuance volumes of crediting mechanisms — not individual credit serial numbers, ownership, or retirements. To verify a specific credit, you need the relevant registry (Verra, Gold Standard, or an Article 6 registry), not the dashboard.
The coverage figure counts emissions subject to any direct price, however low. A large share of covered emissions carry a price below the High-Level Commission corridor. Coverage and price adequacy are different measurements.
Fuel excise taxes — a major real-world carbon cost — are outside the dashboard’s scope. The coverage figure is a floor on the total price signal, not the whole of it. For direct-plus-indirect, use the OECD Effective Carbon Rates series.
The headline price is the instrument’s sticker rate, not the cost a specific emitter bears after free allocation, exemptions, and partial coverage. Quoting the dashboard price as “what companies pay” is wrong.
The revenue figure is public fiscal revenue from taxes and allowance sales — not the total value transacted in carbon markets, which includes secondary trading and credit sales the dashboard does not count as revenue.
Announced or legislated-but-not-in-force instruments are pipeline, not implemented. Counting Brazil’s, India’s, or Türkiye’s developing systems in the implemented total overstates the current state of play.
Common Analytical Errors
Seven technical errors that recur when the dashboard’s data is used in analysis:
- Summing compliance and crediting instrument counts. ETSs, carbon taxes, and crediting mechanisms are counted in different sections; a single “total instruments” figure that merges them obscures the mix.
- Comparing headline prices across instruments without adjusting for coverage. A high price on a narrow base is not more ambitious than a moderate price on a broad base.
- Ignoring instrument overlaps. Double-counting emissions covered by both a carbon tax and an ETS in the same jurisdiction.
- Treating the emissions-weighted average price as a typical price. The weighted average is pulled down by large, low-price systems and is not representative of any single jurisdiction.
- Reading a year’s figure as a trend. Revenue in particular fluctuates with allowance prices; a single-year dip is not a structural decline.
- Quoting an undated figure. Using “the World Bank says X” without the edition year, when X has since changed.
- Confusing coverage with abatement. Coverage measures emissions subject to a price, not emissions actually reduced by it.
Practitioner Use-Cases
Four representative ways practitioners use the dashboard, and what to watch for in each.
Policy benchmarking
A finance ministry designing a carbon tax benchmarks rate, coverage, and revenue against comparable jurisdictions. Watch for: comparing nominal rates without adjusting for coverage and exemptions.
Corporate exposure mapping
A multinational maps which operating jurisdictions price its emissions and at what nominal level. Watch for: treating the dashboard price as the effective cost per installation.
Investor transition-risk analysis
An investor screens a portfolio for carbon-price exposure and models forward price trajectories. Watch for: extrapolating a single year’s revenue or price as a trend.
Academic and market research
Researchers use the downloadable dataset for longitudinal analysis of adoption, coverage, and price. Watch for: mixing dashboard direct-pricing data with indirect-pricing sources without reconciling scope.
Criticisms and Limitations
The dashboard is the most authoritative source of its kind, and it has real limitations that careful users should hold in mind.
Nominal, not effective, prices
The headline price does not capture free allocation, exemptions, or the effective rate a specific emitter faces. Users wanting effective carbon rates must layer in jurisdiction-specific design detail, or turn to the OECD’s complementary series.
Direct-pricing scope excludes major real-world costs
By tracking only direct carbon pricing, the dashboard omits fuel excise taxes and other implicit carbon costs, understating the total price signal in many economies. This is a deliberate scope choice, but it is a limitation for anyone wanting the full carbon-cost picture.
Crediting-market data depends on third parties
Credit issuance and voluntary-market figures rely on data from external providers, and the voluntary market’s opacity means these figures carry more uncertainty than the compliance data. Issuance is tracked; project-level integrity and retirement are not.
Snapshot timing and comparability
Because prices and revenue are captured on reference dates and instruments change through the year, cross-edition comparisons require care. A figure is a snapshot, and comparability across years depends on consistent methodology, which the World Bank maintains but which users must respect when citing.
None of these limitations undermines the dashboard’s central value — a consistent, transparent, longitudinal record of direct carbon pricing. They are the predictable consequences of tracking a fragmented, fast-moving policy landscape on a common basis. The remedy is not to distrust the data but to carry its definitions with every figure quoted.
Future Evolution
Three trajectories will shape the dashboard over the coming years.
Article 6 build-out. As Paris Agreement Article 6.2 cooperative approaches and the 6.4 mechanism scale, the dashboard’s crediting section — particularly the cooperative-approaches tracker — becomes a more central reference for the internationally traded carbon market.
Expanding compliance coverage. With large economies including Brazil, India, and Türkiye developing ETSs, and China’s system extending across heavy industry, the implemented count and coverage figures are set to keep rising — and the dashboard will track the pipeline-to-implemented transitions.
Deeper integration of compliance and crediting. As jurisdictions allow credits into compliance systems and border mechanisms reference carbon prices paid abroad, the once-separate compliance and crediting sides of the market are converging — and the dashboard’s structured separation of the two is what lets analysts follow that convergence without double-counting.
Track how carbon-price data feeds border-adjustment exposure and transition-risk analysis.
Frequently Asked Questions
It is an interactive online tool — formally the State and Trends of Carbon Pricing Dashboard — maintained by the World Bank Group with ICAP. It tracks direct carbon pricing worldwide: emissions trading systems, carbon taxes, and carbon crediting mechanisms, reporting their emissions coverage, price, and revenue. It is the data backbone of the annual State and Trends of Carbon Pricing report.
No. It tracks the existence, design, and issuance volumes of crediting mechanisms, but it does not hold individual credit serial numbers, record ownership, or track retirements. To verify a specific credit you need the relevant registry — Verra, Gold Standard, or an Article 6 registry — not the dashboard.
Direct carbon pricing puts an explicit price per tonne of CO2e on emissions — carbon taxes and ETSs. The dashboard tracks only direct pricing. It excludes indirect carbon pricing, chiefly fuel excise taxes, so the coverage figure is a floor on the total carbon-price signal in an economy. For direct-plus-indirect pricing, the OECD Effective Carbon Rates series is the complementary source.
The State and Trends of Carbon Pricing 2025 edition reported around 80 compliance instruments in operation — 43 carbon taxes and 37 emissions trading systems — up from fewer than 10 in 2005. The dashboard also tracks governmental crediting mechanisms separately. These figures are edition-specific and rise over time, so cite the edition year.
Around 28% of global greenhouse-gas emissions were covered by a direct carbon price per the 2025 edition, rising toward nearly 30% in the 2026 edition, up from roughly 12% a decade earlier. The figure counts emissions subject to any direct price, however low, and excludes fuel taxes — it is not a measure of how much of the world pays a meaningful price.
No. The dashboard reports the nominal price per tonne — the sticker rate. What a specific company pays depends on free allowance allocation, exemptions and rebates, partial sectoral coverage, and overlapping instruments. A high headline price can mean a low effective cost for a given emitter. Use the dashboard to scope exposure, then an instrument-specific calculation to quantify liability.
A compliance instrument is “implemented” once it is formally adopted in legislation and its compliance obligations are in force and enforced. A crediting mechanism is implemented once it has issued credits or has a framework allowing domestic use. Announced or legislated-but-not-in-force instruments are “scheduled” or “under development” — not implemented.
Direct carbon pricing mobilised over US$100 billion for public budgets in 2024 and over US$107 billion in 2025, roughly triple the level of a decade earlier in real terms. This is public fiscal revenue from carbon taxes and ETS allowance sales — not the total value transacted in carbon markets, which also includes secondary trading and credit sales.
The High-Level Commission on Carbon Prices identified a corridor — broadly US$40–80 per tonne of CO2e, rising over time — as the price range consistent with the Paris Agreement’s temperature goals. The dashboard’s price data shows most jurisdictions pricing below this corridor, illustrating the “price gap” that sits alongside the “coverage gap.”
The dashboard’s crediting section tracks participation in Article 6.2 cooperative approaches — the country-to-country transfer of mitigation outcomes — and tracks the Article 6.4 international crediting mechanism among international mechanisms. It is one of the closest things to a single tracker of who is participating in the Paris Agreement’s market mechanisms.
Yes. The dashboard’s underlying dataset is available as an Excel download, and the State and Trends report is published under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence, permitting reuse with attribution. When reusing, cite the specific edition or dashboard access date and carry the definitions — “direct pricing only,” “nominal not effective” — with each figure.
It scopes where and at what nominal level a company’s emissions are exposed to a direct carbon price, informs internal carbon pricing by supplying an external benchmark, and helps anticipate border-adjustment exposure under mechanisms like the EU and UK CBAMs. It sits upstream of accounting: it identifies exposure, but a firm’s actual liability is a downstream, instrument-specific calculation.
Sources and References
Every numerical claim and definitional statement on this page reconciles to the primary World Bank sources below. Where the World Bank has published a definitive figure or definition, the primary source is cited directly; secondary commentary is used only for interpretation.
Primary World Bank sources
- World Bank, State and Trends of Carbon Pricing Dashboard (interactive tool). carbonpricingdashboard.worldbank.org
- World Bank, Carbon Pricing Dashboard — About (methodology, definitions, data download). carbonpricingdashboard.worldbank.org/about
- World Bank, State and Trends of Carbon Pricing 2025. Washington, DC: World Bank. DOI: 10.1596/978-1-4648-2255-1. License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.
- World Bank, State and Trends of Carbon Pricing 2026 (13th edition in current format). worldbank.org/en/publication/state-and-trends-of-carbon-pricing
- World Bank, “Carbon pricing revenues exceeded $100 billion in 2024”, press release, 10 June 2025.
- World Bank, Carbon Pricing Dashboard — Compliance and Credit Fact Sheets. carbonpricingdashboard.worldbank.org/compliance/factsheets
- Partnership for Market Implementation (PMI). pmiclimate.org
Underpinning references and complementary data
- International Carbon Action Partnership (ICAP) — compliance-market data partner for the dashboard.
- High-Level Commission on Carbon Prices — the US$40–80/tCO2e (rising) Paris-consistent price corridor.
- OECD, Effective Carbon Rates 2025 — complementary series covering direct and indirect carbon pricing.
- Paris Agreement, Article 6.2 and Article 6.4 — cooperative approaches and the international crediting mechanism.
- Carbon crediting data contributors cited by the report: Ecosystem Marketplace, S&P Global Commodity Insights, AlliedOffsets, Institute for Climate Economics.
Related GreenCalculus reference pages
- EU Emissions Trading System
- UK Emissions Trading Scheme
- EU CBAM
- UK CBAM
- ICVCM Core Carbon Principles
- VCMI Claims Code of Practice
- CORSIA
- NGFS Climate Scenarios
Publication note
Published 13 July 2026. Initial publication. Reflects the State and Trends of Carbon Pricing Dashboard structure and definitions as accessed, and the headline findings of the State and Trends of Carbon Pricing 2025 and 2026 editions. Instrument counts, coverage, price, and revenue figures are point-in-time and are updated on this page’s annual review cycle keyed to each new State and Trends edition.