Thirteen years after the United Nations set up the first carbon emissions market, the global trading system's influence is waning as it gives way to local and regional plans to combat climate change.

Fewer markets are accepting UN Certified Emissions Reductions, credits created from investment in carbon-reduction programs, as nations from China to California adopt their own standards. In Europe's $US54 billion ($60 billion) market, where lawmakers are tackling a record glut, utilities and manufacturers from EON SE to ThyssenKrupp AG may reach the limit on the CERs they can use by March 2015, data from Bloomberg New Energy Finance show.

The slide in demand for UN credits is hurting the worldwide effort agreed at Kyoto in 1997 to keep increases in temperatures, blamed for floods, droughts and rising sea levels, to less than 2 degrees Celsius from pre- industrial times. There's no global alternative to the UN's Clean Development Mechanism that's plowed $US315 billion into projects from Brazilian wind parks to Cambodian hydropower.

“The CDM's been on life support since 2011, when it became clear that CER demand would be hit by the growing glut of European Union allowances,” said Gareth Phillips, chairman of the Project Developers' Forum lobby group, whose members include OAO Gazprom's trading unit and Mitsubishi Corp.

It's “failing due to a lack of demand and a lack of any sign that there's going to be any demand in the future,” he said last month by phone from Edinburgh.