Welcome to the CDM Rulebook

Dear CDM Stakeholder,

Welcome to the CDM Rulebook, the definitive online database of the CDM rules. Baker & McKenzie has developed the CDM Rulebook over the past 18 months and we are now pleased to  formally launch the site and make it freely available to the public.

Please note that there are no hard copy versions of the CDM Rulebook and there is no 'print all' function on the site.  This is both for environmental reasons (to discourage the unnecessary use of paper, since when printed the site is over 1000 pages long) and for currency reasons (the site will be updated monthly after each Executive Board meeting, so a hard copy version would quickly become out of date).

The development of the CDM Rulebook

Since the Kyoto Protocol entered into force, the carbon market, and particularly the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism, has grown exponentially, and a range of rules have been implemented by the Conference of the Parties (COP), the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties (COP/MOP), the Executive Board and a number of other bodies.

Despite the rapid evolution of the rules, and the range of capacity building measures to increase general awareness of, and familiarity with, the CDM rules, to date there has not been a comprehensive online legal CDM database of all the rules, which is publicly accessible, logically sequenced and easy to navigate and search.

To fill this significant gap, Baker & McKenzie has developed the CDM Rulebook with funding from eight donor organisations: the United Kingdom Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Swedish Energy Agency, the Australian Department of Climate Change, the New Zealand Ministry for the Environment, the Asian Development Bank, the United Nations Development Program, the World Bank and the UNEP Risoe Center. We would like to express our thanks to these donors for their generous support.

The text of the CDM Rulebook has been peer reviewed by our Advisory Panel, comprised of representatives from designated national authorities (DNAs), designated operational entities (DOEs), regulators, lawyers and other market participants, as well as members of Baker & McKenzie's Global Climate Change Practice.

Using this site

The CDM Rulebook is a database of all sources of law for the CDM, including Article 12 of the Kyoto Protocol and decisions of the COP, the COP/MOP and the Executive Board.

Wherever possible, rules and decisions are reproduced in this site in full text. If you wish to view the original documents on the UNFCCC website, visit the relevant "Related rules/decisions" page in each section, and click the hyperlinks to the official UNFCCC CDM website.

The CDM Rulebook allows users to navigate through the project cycles of all project types - large-scale, small-scale, forestry, small-scale forestry and programmatic CDM activities. It also contains an A-Z index, a listing of the key bodies involved in the process, some frequently asked questions and a search function to allow users to easily reach important content.

We recommend that users new to the CDM begin with the annotated Article 12 section or the Overview of the CDM. More experienced users can navigate directly to the relevant section, using the flowchart to the right, the tabs above, or the search function.  The site will be updated after each Executive Board meeting, and the currency of the site is indicated in the top menu bar ("Current to EB 38").

If you would like to reference this site, please see our suggested referencing style.

Finally, while we have taken advantage of a number of avenues to promote the CDM Rulebook, we would be grateful if you would pass on the details of the site to your colleagues and others you think may be interested in making use of it.

We hope you find the CDM Rulebook useful, and we would welcome your comments on any aspects of the site. If you have questions or comments, please contact Louisa Fitz-Gerald.

Yours sincerely,

Paul Curnow (Partner) and Louisa Fitz-Gerald (Associate), Baker & McKenzie's Global Climate Change Practice

Editors of the CDM Rulebook

Donors

The development of the CDM Rulebook has been made possible by the generous funding of the following donors:

Disclaimer

This site has been developed by Baker & McKenzie and has been prepared for general information only. The information contained in this site should not be considered or relied on as legal advice and does not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsors. To the fullest extent allowed by law, Baker & McKenzie excludes all liability (whether arising in contract, for negligence or otherwise) in respect of all and each part of this site, including without limitation any errors or omissions. For further information on Baker & McKenzie's Global Climate Change Practice, click here.