15th Five-Year Plan Calls for Carbon Finance Innovation as Infrastructure Standards Lag

The 15th Five-Year Plan outline has made arrangements for improving the green development policy system, explicitly requiring the enrichment of green financial products and services and the orderly advancement of carbon financial product and derivative innovation. In recent years, localities have conducted extensive exploration in carbon accounts, carbon data platforms, carbon emissions rights registration and settlement, and green financial services, with digital technologies such as blockchain, big data, and artificial intelligence gradually embedded into carbon finance operating scenarios. In actual operations, the problems of financial institutions being "willing to lend but afraid to do so" and enterprises "holding carbon but finding it hard to monetize" have not been fundamentally resolved, and the chain converting carbon data into carbon credit and carbon assets into green capital remains obstructed.

The main difficulties in current carbon finance infrastructure construction have shifted from insufficient technical supply to relatively lagging institutional supply, manifested specifically as platforms being easy to build but standards difficult to unify, data easy to collect but sharing difficult to achieve, and accounts easy to establish but applications difficult to expand. Carbon emissions data is scattered across multiple departments and institutions, including ecological environment, development and reform, statistics, electric power, transportation, and finance. Financial institutions must bear high information search, cross-verification, and compliance review costs to obtain authentic, complete, and traceable environmental information. Even if platforms are built and data is warehoused, without unified rules and efficient coordination, financial institutions cannot directly apply the information to credit approval, risk pricing, and post-loan management.

Digital carbon finance infrastructure construction faces three types of obstruction. First, data standards are uneven: carbon emissions accounting, carbon footprint assessment, environmental information disclosure, and green project identification involve multiple industry standards and departmental rules, with data formats, update frequencies, and evaluation scales not fully consistent. Second, sharing mechanisms are connected but not interoperable: the ownership boundaries of corporate carbon data are not clearly defined, inter-departmental sharing lacks binding obligations and effective incentives, and institutional designs for trade secret protection, data security, and compliance responsibility await refinement, leaving platforms easily in a state of "visible but not usable, connectable but not integrable." Third, financial applications have accounts but no products: carbon account construction mainly serves emissions monitoring, administrative management, and policy identification functions, with insufficient conversion into financial product pricing benchmarks and risk evaluation bases, making it difficult for enterprises to tangibly feel the financial returns brought by emissions reduction behavior.

Digital carbon finance infrastructure has dual technical and institutional characteristics. At the technical level, it encompasses carbon emissions data collection, accounting, certification, transmission, query, and verification, providing underlying support for carbon account operations, carbon asset identification, and financial risk control. At the institutional level, it involves unifying carbon data standards, defining data ownership, establishing sharing rules, and forming financial application mechanisms. The more prominent constraints currently come from high transaction costs, difficulty in internalizing externalities, and difficulty in cross-departmental coordination. Digitalization can reduce data collection and processing costs, but institutionalization determines whether data can truly enter the financial cycle. Carbon finance infrastructure construction has passed the stage of simply competing on platform quantity and technological forms, entering a stage that places greater emphasis on institutional coordination and value conversion.