Mexico’s carbon market issued a record 3.5 million credits in 2025, and the country’s emissions trading system is preparing to leave its pilot phase behind and enter full compliance operation. Those were the two headline signals from the sixth edition of the Mexico Carbon Forum, held this week in Aguascalientes and organized by MÉXICO2, the environmental markets platform of the Mexican Stock Exchange Group (Grupo BMV). For buyers and project developers watching Latin America, the message is that the region’s second-largest economy is assembling the demand side of its carbon market, not just the supply.
Record Issuance Meets a Demand Problem
Eduardo Piquero, Director General of MÉXICO2, told the forum that Mexico’s carbon market reached a record 3.5 million credits issued in 2025. His framing of the next challenge was pointed: increasing domestic demand will be key to giving the market greater liquidity and depth.
That sequence is familiar to anyone who has watched compliance markets mature. Supply infrastructure, registries, methodologies and project pipelines tend to arrive first. What separates a credit factory from a functioning market is a pool of obligated or motivated buyers, and that is precisely the gap Piquero flagged. The two-day forum, which drew roughly 4,000 participants from companies, government, finance and academia, was built almost entirely around closing it.
The ETS Moves Out of Pilot Mode
The more structural development is regulatory. According to Carbon Pulse’s reporting from the forum, years of familiarity with the conditions required to participate in an emissions trading system have prepared regulated companies and other stakeholders in Mexico to move from the pilot phase into the compliance phase.
A pilot ETS builds capability without real scarcity: companies learn to measure, report and verify emissions, and administrators learn to run a registry, but allowances are not yet a binding constraint with real financial consequences. Moving to a compliance phase changes the economics for every covered installation, and it changes the strategic calculus for everyone else. Once a national cap-and-trade system carries real obligations, domestic credits gain a potential compliance use case, state-level carbon taxes interact with a national price signal, and voluntary purchases sit alongside regulated demand instead of substituting for it.
The forum agenda reflected that shift. Sessions covered updates to Mexico’s ETS, state-level carbon taxes, climate-related reporting before the National Banking and Securities Commission (CNBV), and the Science Based Targets initiative’s Corporate Standard 2.0, alongside CORSIA, Article 6 of the Paris Agreement and the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism. This is the agenda of a market preparing for obligations, not one still debating whether carbon pricing applies to it.
States Are Building Their Own Infrastructure
One underappreciated feature of Mexico’s carbon landscape is that subnational governments are not waiting for the federal framework. Host state Aguascalientes used the forum to showcase its own toolkit: a voluntary emissions compensation system that, according to Sarahi Macías, the state’s Minister of Sustainability, Environment and Water, provides “certainty and predictability” to companies that want to transparently offset emissions through projects located in the state, plus a Low-Carbon Seal Program and a State Climate Change Action Program.
Governor María Teresa Jiménez framed the logic in market terms: putting a price on carbon is changing the rules of the global economy and generating resources to finance new technologies, infrastructure and emissions-reduction projects. State-level compensation systems matter for developers because they create local demand and local permitting pathways for projects that may not yet have a national compliance outlet. They also create fragmentation risk: a patchwork of state schemes with different rules is harder to price and harder to scale than a single framework. How state systems nest into, or collide with, a compliance-phase federal ETS is an open design question.
The Financial Sector Is Being Pulled In
Perhaps the clearest sign of maturation was who else was in the room. Jorge Alegría, Director General of Grupo BMV, told attendees that companies preparing for climate change by cutting emissions or adapting are “the most valuable for investors.” Alba Aguilar, Director General of the Mexican Council for Sustainable Finance, argued that Mexico’s financial sector must incorporate the carbon market as a tool to manage climate-transition risks, pointing to the new regulation that puts a price on greenhouse gas emissions. Guillermo Zamarripa, president of the Mexican Association of Retirement Fund Managers, framed state-level strategies as complements to the national agenda.
When stock exchange leadership, sustainable finance bodies and pension fund managers converge on the same conference stage as project developers, the market is being repositioned from an environmental niche to financial infrastructure. CNBV climate reporting sessions point the same way: disclosure obligations create the data layer on which compliance markets and institutional participation depend.
What Buyers, Developers and Investors Should Watch
Three markers will determine whether this readiness converts into a working compliance market. First, the formal rules of the ETS compliance phase: covered sectors, thresholds, allocation method and, critically for credit markets, whether and how offsets are admitted for compliance use. Second, demand formation in the voluntary and state-level channels Piquero described: whether the record 2025 issuance of 3.5 million credits finds domestic buyers or continues to depend on external demand. Third, regulatory coherence between federal and state schemes, which will decide whether Mexico offers developers one market or several small ones.
For international buyers, the practical takeaway is timing. Mexico is not yet a source of compliance-grade supply for foreign schemes, but a functioning domestic ETS with offset provisions and active state programs would make it one of Latin America’s more complete carbon market jurisdictions. For developers, the Aguascalientes model shows that state governments can be counterparties and demand creators in their own right. The pilot years built the plumbing. The compliance phase will show whether anyone turns on the tap.
