The Lithuanian government will imminently be signing four transactions with unnamed buyers to sell its unused Assigned Amount Units (AAUs) or emissions permits. This will be the first time Lithuania is able to sell its surplice AAUs and the income generated from the sale will be used for subsidies, loans and climate change investment projects.
Lithuania has a 50 million surplice available of AAUs allowance of green house gas emission for 2012, but currently the identities of the four buyers and the size of the sale are not being made public.
An AAU is tradable carbon credit as created at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change meeting at Kyoto, Japan in 1997. Under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, countries with unused AAUs can sell them to states that have gone over their emissions target quota.
The Kyoto Protocol was adopted on 11th December 1997, enforced on 16th February 2005 and, as of April 2010, 191 countries have signed and sanctioned the protocol.
