SINGAPORE – Mr Mikkel Larsen, chief executive officer of Singapore’s Climate Impact X (CIX), a carbon credit exchange and marketplace, has announced his resignation, CIX said in a statement on March 21.
Mr Larsen, 49, will remain in his role until a new or interim CEO is appointed.
He will continue to serve as a member of CIX’s board, the company said. A company spokeswoman confirmed the news to The Straits Times.
Mr Larsen said that he was stepping down as CEO to focus on his family. “Over the past seven years, I have lived away from my wife and children for six of them. I have made the decision to now give my family the priority they deserve,” he said.
“It has been a very difficult decision to leave a company that I had the good fortune of helping to build, and that I have so much conviction in.”
Mr Larsen has been with CIX since it was launched at the end of 2021. CIX is a joint venture funded by DBS, Standard Chartered, the Singapore Exchange and GenZero, a decarbonisation-focused investment platform founded by state investor Temasek.
CIX, which has an office in London, has grown to become a global marketplace, auction house and exchange for carbon credits. It focuses on high-quality carbon credits – those that come from projects that are fully verified and use the highest standards to benefit the climate, local communities and nature.
Each credit represents a tonne of planet-warming carbon dioxide (CO2) and they are generated from projects that either remove CO2 from the air or prevent it from being emitted in the first place, such as saving a rainforest from being chopped down.
Buyers use carbon credits to meet their climate change targets, such as the goal to cut planet-warming emissions to net zero by the middle of the century, by buying credits from carbon projects around the world and counting the emissions savings from those projects as their own.
However the global trade in carbon credits has suffered from deep concerns over their quality and integrity and a lack of transparency. While exchanges, investors, regulators and standards bodies have tried to address the concerns, global trading in carbon credits has failed to grow as fast as many had hoped.
In 2023, CIX laid off a small number of staff as part of a restructuring, but it did not say who or how many at the time.
The CIX spokeswoman said Mr Larsen’s departure was unrelated to the restructuring exercise.
“Apart from natural attrition, we expect a stabilisation in our headcount going forward as we continue to retain a strong positive outlook on the long-term viability of carbon markets,” she said.
“The restructuring exercise undertaken was aimed at optimising our operations and better positioning CIX to meet the evolving needs of the market we serve.”
