MONROVIA: Matthew Walley’s eyes sweep over the large forest that has sustained his Indigenous community in Liberia for generations.
Even as the morning sun casts a golden hue over the canopy, a sense of unease lingers. Their use of the land is being threatened, and they have organized to resist the possibility of losing their livelihood.
In the past year, the Liberian government has agreed to sell about 10% of the West African country’s land — equivalent to 4,220 square miles — to Dubai-based company, Blue Carbon, to preserve forests that might otherwise be logged and used for farming, the primary livelihood for many communities.
Blue Carbon, which did not respond to repeated emails and calls, seeking comment, plans to make money from this conservation by selling carbon credits to polluters to offset their emissions as they burn fossil fuels.
Some experts argue that the model offers little climate benefit, while activists label it “carbon colonialism.”
Activists say the government has no legal right over the land and that Liberian law acknowledges Indigenous land ownership.
The government and Blue Carbon reached an agreement in March 2023 — months after the company’s launch—without consulting local communities, which are concerned about a lack of protections.
“There is no legal framework on carbon credits in Liberia, and so we don’t have rules and regulations to fight for ourselves as a community,” said Walley, whose community, Neezuin, could see about 573 square kilometers signed away to Blue Carbon.
A raft of agreements between at least five African countries and Blue Carbon could give the company control over large swaths of land on the continent.
In Kenya, Indigenous populations already have been evicted to make way for other carbon credits projects, according to rights groups, like Amnesty International and Survival International.
They have criticized the projects as “culturally destructive,” lacking transparency and threatening the livelihoods and food security of rural African populations.
“Many such projects are associated with appalling human rights abuses against local communities at the hands of park rangers,” said Simon Counsell, an independent researcher of conservation projects in Kenya, Congo, Cameroon and other countries.
“The majority had involved evictions, most were involved in conflict with local people, and almost none had ever sought or gained the landholders’ consent,” said Counsell, former director of Rainforest Foundation UK, a nonprofit that supports both human rights and environmental protection.
Africa contributes the least to greenhouse gas emissions, but its vast natural resources, such as forests, are crucial in the fight against climate change.
Indigenous populations traditionally rely on forests for their livelihoods, highlighting the tension between climate goals and economic realities.
Cash-strapped governments in Africa are attracted to these kinds of conservation initiatives because they generate badly needed income despite concerns about human rights abuses and transparency.
Blue Carbon has only one project under development in Zimbabwe, which involves approximately 20% of the country’s land, according to the company’s website.
However, through opaque agreements, the company has potentially secured staggering amounts of land across other countries, including Kenya, Liberia, Tanzania and Zambia, since forming in late 2022.
In Liberia, the government is required to obtain prior, informed consent from communities before using their land for such deals. However, former President George Weah’s government moved forward without it, according to activists and communities.
Communities only became aware after activists mobilized against the deal following a leak through a network of nongovernmental organizations.
Although the agreement said talks with communities would be done last November, locals and activists reported that they did not happen.
“There is no opposition to fighting climate change, but it has to be done in a way that respects people’s rights and does not breach the law,” said Ambulah Mamey, a Liberian activist who has helped galvanize opposition to the Blue Carbon deal.
After protests from communities and activists, Weah’s government halted the deal before the presidential vote last year, but he still lost the election.
“We resolved to vote the George Weah government out to stop the deal, which will devastatingly affect communities, but we don’t know if the new government will restart it,” said Walley, the community leader. “We are waiting for them,” he stressed.
The new director of Liberia’s Environmental Protection Agency, Emmanuel Yarkpawolo Urey, said the Blue Carbon deal was rushed through “a quick process that does not lend itself to a good level of transparency.”
He confirmed the deal is on hold and said Liberia is now developing rules for selling carbon credits, which will “emphasize balance between environmental goals and economic well-being of our people and take care of concerns about Indigenous people’s rights, including alternative livelihood means.”
Blue Carbon, in March, 2024, sent out invitations to developers, asking for proposals for carbon offset projects.
The company document, which activists shared with The Associated Press, does not say which countries it is targeting, just that basic land information will be shared with applicants.
The process seems “extraordinarily opaque” given the significant amount of some countries’ land involved, said Counsell, the conservation researcher.
He raised concerns about whether governments understand it, let alone the people living in those areas.
“They are precisely the kind of opaque and inequitable arrangements that the U.N. should very specifically be guarding against as it continues to develop the rules for a global carbon market,” Counsell said in an email.
Blue Carbon was founded by Emirati royal Sheikh Ahmed Dalmook Al Maktoum, whose private holdings include fossil fuel operations.
It has not disclosed the governments or companies that will buy the credits generated from its carbon projects.
The effectiveness of carbon offsetting itself is debated. One concern is the concept of “additionality,” or the amount of carbon that a project claims it reduces through preventing deforestation. In many cases, it’s possible those reductions could have happened anyway.
A study by Counsell and Survival International on one carbon credit initiative, called the Northern Kenya Grassland Carbon Project, says livestock farmers whose livelihoods were upended by the project had operated within “broadly sustainable limits.”
This, Walley said, is similar to the practice of communities in Liberia, where they have a duty to conserve forests under government rules.
In addition, 40% of Liberia’s forestland is already protected.
“This means that the project, in climate terms, has no ‘additionality,’ and any carbon credits generated do not represent genuine new savings of carbon,” Counsell said.
Plus, over time, trees release the carbon they’re storing back into the atmosphere through natural aging, forest fires or commercial use, which undermines the idea of forests absorbing carbon permanently, Counsell said.
There is also the problem of a “zero” benefit to the climate. Protecting forests in one area may result in deforestation elsewhere as communities affected by conservation projects move to earn a living.
According to global carbon credits price, a ton of carbon credit is US$2,500.
Also, the FINANCIAL TIMES reported that “A carbon credit boom could channel money towards poorer countries with smaller carbon footprints and higher financing needs, to help them address the effects of increasingly extreme weather and temperature changes.
But the scale and speed of deal-making among countries over available land have sparked concern about a lack of guardrails around this system.”
Moreover, “Seller countries are not being given enough time to develop a natural resource strategy that would promote a fair trade in carbon credits,” say community leaders and activists in the countries where Blue Carbon is active.
Key issues include revenue-sharing, land rights and the potential impact on the host countries’ ability to hit its own climate targets.
“The methods of exploitation might be new but the consequences are not so different to the last 200 years of land grabs in Liberia,” says David Young, an independent expert on civil society’s role in forest governance in the country.
“The promises to the communities are vague and unpredictable and it’s like logging or mining or palm oil all over again.”
Scientists have also warned about the broader risk to the planet of giving big polluters a green light to continue pumping oil and gas based on purchases made from the existing unregulated market for credits.
And scientists including Thales West, of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam’s Institute for Environmental Studies, have argued the market is underpinned by tenuous accounting standards, based on scenarios that overestimate both volumes of carbon removed from the atmosphere and the permanence of these removals.
“We are fooling ourselves when we purchase these offsets,” West has said. The race for deals Carbon credits are part of the UAE’s official strategy to cut its national emissions by 2030, alongside other investments including in hydrogen gas and decarbonizing steel production.
After the country pledged US$450m to help develop African carbon markets in September, Mohamed Ben Salem, who leads on voluntary carbon markets for the UAE’s Presidency of the climate conference, announced in last October that the UAE would like to see a 50-fold increase in the size of this market globally.
“Voluntary carbon markets can drive real, on the ground effective climate action with significant co-benefits to climate, local communities and nature,” he said at a conference in London.
And reforestation is likely to be a central part of future carbon markets. A peer-reviewed study published in Nature Journal recently estimated that 139 gigatons of carbon could be removed from the atmosphere by better protecting existing forested areas where relatively few people live or work.
This is more than six times the carbon that the UN’s environment program has said needs to be cut from annual emissions by 2030 to limit global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
For François Megret, head of carbon trading at First Abu Dhabi Bank—which is the UAE’s biggest lender, an official partner of the COP-28 summit and a backer of Blue Carbon—carbon trading among states should start as soon as possible. “We don’t have 20 years and we don’t want to lose these two years or three years to activate something,” he said at the same conference.
But some of the earliest deals are being criticized for their lack of transparency and accountability. Liberia, unlike other countries approached by Blue Carbon, does not yet have a law governing the sale and taxation of carbon credits.
A copy of Blue Carbon’s memorandum of understanding with Liberia, in July 2023 and seen by the Financial Times, proposed to give the Dubai-based company exclusive rights to generate and sell carbon credits on about 1mn hectares of Liberian land.
It would receive 70 per cent of the value of the credits for the next three decades, and sell these tax-free for a decade. The government would receive the other 30 per cent, with some of this going to local communities.
Rainforest in Liberia, where Blue Carbon is in discussions to acquire management rights to about a tenth of the country’s land mass. And consultation was due to take place between August and November in 2023, according to the document.
But Zeleman says that the local leaders he engaged with on the land have still not been consulted about the deal. Blue Carbon denies failing to consult with communities and says it will follow all government “laws, rules and regulations once formal binding agreements are entered into”.
It adds: “Blue Carbon is mindful of all community and human rights including land rights in Liberia.”
Some activists have heavily criticized the proposed deal. Allowing a foreign company to manage such a big portion of Liberian land would endanger the livelihoods and community land ownership of up to a million people, groups including the Rainforest Foundation UK, Friends of the Earth and Earthsight wrote in a letter earlier 2023 year.
The government was “handing over decisions about how a substantial part of its carbon emissions for the next 30 years are to be managed to a UAE firm that has existed for less than a year, and which has no track record in carbon trading,” they said in the letter.
More than that, no contract with Blue Carbon has yet been signed, says Wilson Tarpeh, (former) head of Liberia’s Environmental Protection Agency, who flew to Dubai over the summer in 2023 to discuss the proposal.
Liberia’s government is working on developing a legal framework for carbon developers that highlights “carbon belongs to the state”, he says, and is also consulting with civil society on the Blue Carbon project. “We value their position.”
Tarpeh estimates that Liberia had 2bn tons of carbon dioxide locked into its forest, absorbed through photosynthesis. “The size of the carbon stock is huge, so anybody will be tempted to sell our carbon,” he says.
“But it has to be a rules-based system. It’s not like buying a candy bar,” he stressed.
Other countries approached by Blue Carbon have been in a stronger position to respond. The foreign and environment ministers of South America’s Suriname, another small country almost entirely covered in tropical forest, received a similar offer to that of Liberia when they flew out for pitch meetings with al-Maktoum in Blue Carbon’s offices in the Burj Al Salam skyscraper in Dubai in August.
Suriname’s gross domestic product per capita is about 10 times greater than Liberia’s and its government has more than a decade of experience engaging with financing mechanisms for emission reduction, including under the UN’s ill-fated Clean Development Mechanism, which had its roots in the 1997 Kyoto protocol eventually superseded by the Paris agreement.
So, the ministers were better able to push back against Blue Carbon’s initial proposal to take a significant cut of future carbon credit revenues, according to an adviser to Suriname on the deal who asked not to be named.
Panelists at COP-28 in Dubai said the UAE has bet that international carbon markets could be a central pillar in the climate solutions offered to world leaders at the conference.” SOURCEES: ASSOCIATED PRESS/FINANCIAL TIMES.
