“Twenty years is too long; the future is shaped by the urgency of today.”

As Confucius once observed, "Time flows on like a river, never ceasing day or night."

Two decades have passed in what feels like a single breath, and Climate Bridge now marks its 20^th anniversary.

Twenty years ago, building a bridge connecting East and West in the shared effort to address climate change was little more than a dream, sketched in outline rather than in substance. Today, our dream stands built. We have supported more than 500 emission reduction and removal projects, and forged lasting relationships with thousands of clients and partners across the world.

Across this bridge have flowed not only carbon credits and capital, but also technology, knowledge, and collaboration. Above all, it has carried something harder to measure: a shared belief that market-based solutions can help humanity tackle one of its greatest challenges.

20 years is a long time. It has marked an important chapter in my own career and in the careers of many of my colleagues, and it has witnessed the birth, evolution, setbacks and steady progress of both China's carbon market and the global carbon market. But a bridge, however finely built, exists only to be crossed: the more people who choose to cross it, the stronger and more meaningful it becomes.

When Climate Bridge first started out, we often had to explain, patiently and more than once, that carbon trading had nothing to do with coal, charcoal or any physical form of carbon: it concerned greenhouse gas reductions and removals, represented by tradable carbon credits. Today, the questions we are asked have changed entirely - people want to know how we saw the potential of this sector twenty years ago, long before it became one of the defining issues of our time, and what has kept us committed through every twist of its evolution.

The climate and carbon sector has certainly earned far more attention than it once commanded. And yet twenty years, for all it has held, is also a short time. In humanity's response to climate change, we are still only at the beginning. Around the world, people are no longer standing by, but taking action, for the sake of our planet and of the generations still to come. The next twenty years will bring greater opportunities still to the climate and carbon sector.

Yet the path has been far from smooth. Our 20 years of perseverance were shaped by repeated cycles of optimism and disappointment, progress and setbacks, as the sector paused, restarted and reinvented itself time and again - never once allowed to settle.

Few sectors have weathered such repeated, market-wide disruption: demand vanishing almost overnight, supply collapsing, entire customer ecosystems needing to be rebuilt from the ground up. We lived through the withdrawal of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) from China, the launch and abrupt suspension of the China Certified Emission Reduction (CCER) scheme, and the controversies that swept through projects under the Verified Carbon Standard (VCS). Each sent shockwaves through the entire market.

Today, those crises seem distant, softened by time into mere chapters of a longer story. At the time, however, they brought sleepless nights, hard decisions, and constant questions about our future. Like many organisations navigating uncertainty, we found ourselves returning, again and again, to the oldest philosophical questions: Who are we? Where have we come from? And where are we going?

Many of the companies that once stood alongside us chose to leave the market, or to reinvent themselves beyond recognition. We chose to stay. What sustained us was a simple but steadfast conviction: that humanity would ultimately act to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and confront climate change; that China's carbon market would continue to mature and grow ever more connected with the world; and that our greatest strength lay not in size or scale, but in our ability to adapt quickly, spot emerging opportunities, and serve our clients and partners wherever the market led us.

As we look ahead to Climate Bridge’s future, I have every reason for optimism. In China, the transition to a low-carbon economy has become a powerful engine of economic development, while renewable energy and electric vehicles have emerged as global emblems of innovation. Internationally, despite differing voices and geopolitical uncertainty, the mounting toll of climate-related disasters makes one conclusion harder to escape with each passing year: cooperation in addressing climate change is not just desirable, but also inevitable.

Above all, I feel gratitude. To all our clients and partners: thank you for your trust and your unwavering support across two decades. You have given this bridge its purpose and its lasting value. It has been our privilege to support your decarbonisation journey, and to help turn the vision we once merely imagined into something real.

To every past and present member of our team: thank you for your dedication, your resilience and your hard work. Your commitment has helped this bridge grow a little further with every passing year.

Without you, there would have been no first 20 years of Climate Bridge. And with you, we will continue to shape Climate Bridge’s story for its next 20 years and beyond.

I hope, sincerely, that we will continue this journey together - extending Climate Bridge ever further, span by span, until it reaches every corner of our shared planet, from the East to the West.

Zhang Zemin

Co-Founder and Chairman, Climate Bridge Group

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