Singapore has become one of the fastest signers of bilateral carbon market agreements under Article 6.2 of the Paris Agreement, but the credits those agreements are supposed to produce are not arriving at the same speed. A Carbon Pulse feature published on 11 August found that the pace of project development under Singapore’s Implementation Agreements is lagging well behind the diplomacy, with actual delivery of Internationally Transferred Mitigation Outcomes (ITMOs) likely years away. For buyers counting on Singapore-linked supply and for developers choosing where to build Article 6 projects, the gap between signed paper and delivered tonnes is now the variable that matters.
The Agreement Stack Singapore Has Built
Singapore’s strategy is deliberate. The city-state has assembled a network of Article 6.2 Implementation Agreements and precursor deals with host countries across several regions, including the Philippines, Thailand, Peru and Tanzania. The Philippines agreement, signed at ASEAN Climate Week, enables the joint authorisation of mitigation activities and the authorisation and transfer of ITMOs between the two countries. Alongside the bilateral track, Singapore has worked on the market plumbing: in November 2025, it published an Article 6.2 crediting protocol together with Gold Standard and Verra, connecting its government-to-government framework to the two largest voluntary standards.
The Economic Development Board markets Singapore as a carbon services and trading hub, and the agreement stack is the foundation of that claim. The problem is that a foundation is not a building.
Why ITMOs Take Years, Not Months
An Implementation Agreement is a permission slip, not a credit. Between signature and delivery, a project still has to be designed, validated against an approved methodology, registered, monitored, verified and issued, and the host country still has to authorise the units and apply a corresponding adjustment in its national accounts. Each step depends on capacity in the host country: designated national authorities, domestic registries, authorisation procedures and links to the Article 6 database. Many of Singapore’s partner countries are still building exactly that infrastructure, which is why delivery timelines are measured in years.
This is a structural feature of Article 6, not a Singapore-specific failure. Signing an agreement is a diplomatic act. Delivering an ITMO is an industrial process with a government accounting step at the end, and the second moves far slower than the first.
The Numbers Behind the Delivery Gap
The global data confirm that Singapore is the rule, not the exception. According to the Article 6 Implementation Partnership’s June 2026 update, 112 bilateral arrangements had been formalised under Article 6, with 68 parties engaged in bilateral cooperation, and the number of agreements is growing faster than the number of completed transfers.
The demand side makes the imbalance visible. IATA counts 130 states participating in CORSIA as of 1 January 2026, yet only ten countries had supplied CORSIA-eligible emissions units through a Letter of Authorisation as of April 2026. The centralised track shows the same pattern in miniature: the first credits under the Paris Agreement Crediting Mechanism were approved for issuance only on 26 February 2026, from a clean cooking project in Myanmar, with part of the volume authorised for use by South Korea. Notably, the approved volume came in around 40% below what the same project would have received under the old CDM parameters, a reminder that the new system credits more conservatively even when it works.
Meanwhile the legacy system is closing. CDM issuance requests ended on 30 June 2026, and transfer and cancellation transactions terminate on 31 December 2026, so the fallback supply channel is shrinking just as the new one ramps slowly.
What It Means for Buyers and Developers
For buyers, the practical consequence is that Singapore-linked Article 6 supply should be treated as a forward curve, not a spot market. Procurement strategies that assume near-term ITMO volumes from these agreements carry delivery risk, and any offtake pricing should reflect how much host-country infrastructure still sits between the signature and the first transfer. Authorised, corresponding-adjusted units will keep commanding a premium precisely because so few exist.
For developers, the lag cuts the other way. Host countries inside Singapore’s agreement network have a motivated counterparty and, increasingly, standardised protocols to work with. Projects that build monitoring and documentation to Article 6 requirements now will be first in the authorisation queue when national systems mature. The Philippine agreement’s provision for joint authorisation of mitigation activities is a template worth watching, because it shortens one of the longest steps in the chain.
What to Watch
Three checkpoints will show whether the gap is closing. First, the first recorded ITMO transfer under any Singapore Implementation Agreement: only a transfer with a corresponding adjustment proves the plumbing works end to end. Second, how quickly partner countries operationalise their authorisation procedures and registries, since that is the binding constraint. Third, whether the Singapore, Gold Standard and Verra crediting protocol starts producing actual project pipelines rather than remaining a framework document.
Article 6’s bottleneck has moved. It is no longer the rulebook, and it is no longer the willingness to sign. It is the slow, unglamorous work of turning agreements into issued, authorised, adjusted tonnes, and Singapore’s experience shows exactly how long that conversion takes.
