Overview

The Virtual Emissions Trading Program (VETP) is a sophisticated and flexible emissions trading simulation tool designed to help build the corporate capacity necessary to understand and participate in an Australian emissions trading scheme.

Workshops based on VETP provide detailed interactive, 'hands-on' learning about carbon markets - markets in which emission allowances, permits or credits are bought and sold. Two kinds of carbon markets exist: the compliance (or regulatory) market, and the voluntary market. An example of the compliance market includes emissions trading schemes. Emissions trading is either increasingly used or proposed as a mechanism by which governments and corporations can achieve greenhouse gas emissions reductions. Australia may have an emissions trading scheme by 2010.

Through VETP, virtual businesses representing stylized corporations from various sectors of the Australian economy are linked to emissions profiles, and carbon emissions regulatory regimes are imposed. The focus is on identifying the key issues and emerging opportunities that successful corporations will need to address and take advantage of in a carbon constrained future.

The VETP system of risk management and carbon strategy enables individuals, corporations and governments to gain a superior understanding of climate change policies in general and emissions trading in particular. There are several stages of deliberation and decision-making from emissions reduction investment to allocation of permits to exploiting the secondary market in order to achieve compliance.

VETP is unique in that it is a capacity building, risk management and scenario analysis tool provided by an independent industry organisation - EcoCarbon.
 
Key Features

The key features of VETP include:

• Trading roles (emitters, traders, foresters, governments)
• Cap-and-trade, baseline-and-credit and mixed emissions trading schemes
• Production and consumption-based emission profiles
• Various permit allocation options
• Internal corporate emission reduction projects
• External project-based credits
• Central electronic carbon market
• Risk management information displays and analysis tools
• Flexible settings for trading rules, interest and inflation rates, compliance periods, penalties, emission profiles, trading limits and emission reduction investment and credit trading options

• Corporations involved in the generation or consumption of large amounts of energy, or in industrial processes resulting in emissions of greenhouse gases
• Government policy makers
• Non-government organisations
• Consultants, brokers, traders and banks
• Executives with the need to understand greenhouse and climate change issues
• Educational institutions