New Delhi, Sept. 19 -- Carbon markets are usually discussed in South Asia as a new source of climate finance: restore a forest, change an agricultural practice, capture methane or install cleaner technology, quantify the avoided or removed emissions, and sell the resulting carbon credits. But this framing may be too narrow. The more consequential economic opportunity could lie not in selling the carbon credit itself, but in building the industry required to create, measure, verify, finance and trade it.

That distinction matters because a carbon credit is not simply a tonne of carbon dioxide reduced somewhere. Before that tonne becomes a marketable asset, it passes through an increasingly sophisticated value chain: project feasibility, ba...