Pedro Moura Costa  Pedro Moura Costa (born 1963, in Brazil) is an entrepreneur involved in environmental finance with a focus on the international efforts for greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reductions. Of particular relevance, he was the founder and President of EcoSecurities Group Plc., one of the leading project developers for the international carbon markets, and has written widely about the policy and science of climate change mitigation, including contributions to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports. Moura Costa’s involvement with the carbon emission reduction sector started in 1991, with the development of two of the first carbon forestry projects worldwide, namely the Innoprise-Face Foundation Rainforest Rehabilitation Project and the Innoprise-New England Power Reduced Impact Logging Project, both in Sabah, Malaysia. Moura Costa served as Senior Project Officer for Innoprise between 1991 and 1995, involved with both these projects. While the concept of ‘joint implementation’ of greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduction projects (also called "carbon offset projects") was launched at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED, “the Earth Summit”), the early carbon offset projects of the 1990s suffered from a lack of specialised services to support them. One service of particular importance is that of independent verification of carbon offsets, as offsets are dependent on proving a shift of behaviour in relation to a baseline (this shift is referred as "additionality", in the sector). Moura Costa identified the absence of independent verification services as one of the limiting factors to the growth of the carbon market at that time, and in 1996 he developed the first carbon offset verification service worldwide, which was licensed to the Swiss certification company SGS (Société Générale de Surveillance). The first client for this certification service was the Costa Rican National GHG Mitigation Programme, developed by OCIC (Costa Rican Office on Joint Implementation). After the launch of the Kyoto Protocol (see below), independent certification of carbon emission reductions became a mandatory requirement under the rules of the Clean Development Mechanism (i.e., the carbon credits of this mechanism are called CERs, meaning Certified Emission Reductions). To pursue the work with SGS and the government of Costa Rica, Moura Costa created EcoSecurities, a company specialised in the development of greenhouse gas mitigation projects. EcoSecurities was founded in January 1997 by Moura Costa and environmental economist Marc Stuart to provide "environmental finance solutions".