For the first time, a Moroccan company that installs renewable capacity, upgrades an industrial process, captures landfill methane or changes its agricultural practices will have a legal route to certify the resulting emission reductions and sell them to a foreign buyer under the Paris Agreement.
Draft law 62.25 on climate change and the organisation of the carbon market, published by the Secretariat General of the Government and open to public comment until mid-October, sets out that route. It is a genuine opening. It is also narrower, slower and less bankable than most project sponsors assume.
Here is what it establishes, and what it leaves unresolved.
Three markets, three sets of rules
The draft distinguishes three channels, each with its own criteria.
The first covers cooperative approaches between states under Article 6.2 of the Paris Agreement, the channel used by the bilateral agreement Morocco signed with Norway in May. The second is the centralised mechanism supervised by the UN bodies under Article 6.4. The third is the voluntary market, where buyers offset their footprint without any state commitment involved.
The Article 6.2 channel is the most tightly regulated and serves as the template for the rest of the text. Participation requires obtaining the status of participant or approved entity from the administration. It also requires the project sponsor to be a legal entity incorporated under Moroccan law, meaning a foreign group must hold the project through a local subsidiary.
Who owns the credits
The draft treats certified reductions as intangible movable property, evidenced by their registration in the holder’s account in the national registry. The administration will set the conditions under which they are treated as financial assets when traded on capital markets.
Ownership goes to whoever holds a property right, a concession or any other legal right allowing them to operate the asset or activity underlying the project. For programme-based reductions, it goes to the implementing units, provided those units hold rights transferred by the participating entities.
That formulation leaves an open question for assets developed under concession or backed by public offtake contracts, which describes a large share of Morocco’s renewable pipeline. On a solar plant sold under a PPA, whether the credits belong to the producer or to the offtaker is not settled by the text. It will be settled by whichever party thought to write it into the contract.
A four-stage pathway
Stage one: approval of the project idea. Filed through the national registry and assessed against eight criteria. Two of them bite. The project must appear among those the Nationally Determined Contribution makes conditional on foreign support, or be compatible with its objectives. And it must face financial, technological or regulatory obstacles that make it impossible to deliver on the sponsor’s own resources without the revenue from selling the reductions.
Stage two: the full dossier. Detailed technical and financial tables, monitoring arrangements, mechanisms guaranteeing the durability of the reductions, and a validation report from an accredited body confirming the project can deliver what it claims. If the dossier is not filed within two years, the approval lapses and the process restarts from zero.
Stage three: authorisation to execute. A technical commission of administration representatives, public establishments and experts issues an opinion; the administration then grants or refuses. The authorisation runs for three years, with renewal to be requested at least three months before expiry. From issuance until the reductions are effectively achieved, the sponsor files an annual progress report. Failing to file it carries a fine of MAD 500,000 to 2 million.
Stage four: authorisation to transfer. This is the step most sponsors underestimate. Executing a project does not authorise selling what it produces. A separate transfer application must be filed every year, supported by a verification report from an accredited body, which cannot be the body that validated the project upstream.
Two unknowns that make carbon revenue unmodellable
At the transfer stage, two constraints apply.
The administration sets, each year, the total volume of reductions whose transfer may be authorised, and may establish a national reserve or set annual caps and quotas. And a share of every authorised transfer is allocated to the State, which counts it towards its own climate commitments. The percentage will be set by regulation. It is not yet known.
An uncertain volume, reduced by an unknown levy. Until the implementing decrees are published, no carbon revenue line belongs in a financial model: at most a sensitivity in the annex, with the assumed deduction stated explicitly.
The additionality trap
The eligibility test is worth restating, because it inverts the usual commercial logic: a project that is already profitable does not qualify.
Carbon revenue is not a margin enhancer layered onto a bankable project. It is designed to unlock projects that cannot be financed without it. For a rooftop or captive solar installation that already clears its hurdle rate on avoided electricity costs, the carbon route is closed. It becomes relevant for marginal projects: remote sites, harder industrial processes, methane capture, longer-payback configurations.
What the text does not do
The draft creates no obligation to reduce emissions. No emissions ceiling is enforceable against a Moroccan installation, and the only duty it imposes on economic operators is to supply data to a national climate transparency platform.
The carbon tax provided for under framework law 69-19 has been announced repeatedly, most recently for January 2026, and remains unlegislated. The CESE has floated a range of USD 5 to 10 per tonne of CO₂ equivalent, against roughly EUR 87 per tonne on the European market in late 2025, which makes the deductible amount at the EU border marginal.
The practical consequence for industrial clients: the driver for decarbonisation in Morocco is not domestic regulation. It is exposure to the EU carbon border mechanism on exports, and the cost of electricity.
What to do now
Write the credit ownership clause. Any PPA, concession or EPC contract signed from here on should allocate carbon rights explicitly. The text leaves it to the parties; silence will favour whoever holds the better position later.
Test additionality before anything else. If the project clears its return threshold unaided, the carbon route is closed and the effort is better spent elsewhere.
Keep carbon out of the base case. Sensitivity only, with an explicit assumption on the State levy.
Budget for two separate certifiers. Validation and verification cannot be performed by the same body, and neither may provide advisory, technical or financial services to the project it certifies.
Watch the implementing decrees. Around twenty provisions are suspended pending regulation, with no deadline attached, including filing requirements, procedural timelines, the composition of the technical commission, and the State levy rate. The competent administration that will exercise these powers is never named in the text.
