Building Bridges Across Carbon Borders: From fragmentation to interoperability

About the Event

As more CBAMs emerge worldwide, businesses face a growing patchwork of compliance systems, reporting rules, and carbon accounting methods. While CBAMs are designed to prevent carbon leakage and support climate ambition, this regulatory fragmentation risks increasing costs for companies without delivering proportional climate benefits.

In partnership with the International Chamber of Commerce, this event brought together policy-makers, businesses, and other stakeholders to:

• Map the current CBAM landscape and recent policy developments
• Share firsthand business experience with CBAM compliance
• Identify key bottlenecks in reporting, verification, and administrative requirements
• Explore priorities for interoperability across emerging CBAM regimes
• Clarify the roles of trade policy-makers, regulators, and standard-setting bodies

The discussion aimed to generate practical recommendations for reducing regulatory fragmentation while safeguarding climate integrity.

The event consisted of three panels, followed by open discussions:

• The CBAM Landscape: Mechanisms, Rationale, and Recent Developments - Set the stage for a shared understanding of what CBAMs are, why they are proliferating, and how the global landscape is evolving.
• The Business Reality: Compliance Experiences, Costs, and the Risk of Fragmentation - Drawing on firsthand business experience, participants examined what CBAM compliance looks like in practice, including early lessons from EU CBAM, cost implications, and what a fragmented multi-CBAM world could mean for companies and supply chains.
• Interoperability Priorities: What Needs to Change, and Who Is Working on It? - Participants identified practical steps to ease compliance burdens and took stock of existing international initiatives on CBAM coordination and carbon pricing interoperability.