By AFP’s Evelyn Kpadeh Seagbeh and Code for Africa’s Kunle Adebajo. Supported by insights from Code for Africa’s Anita Igbine, Eliud Akwei, Jacktone Momanyi, and Moffin Njoroge.
When Liberia’s government signed an agreement with a little-known Dubai company run by a royal sheikh in 2023, the “carbon credit” deal promised to protect vast tracts of forests and offset big polluters’ emissions.
It was one of a flurry of deals UAE-based Blue Carbon signed that year covering millions of hectares of forests across Africa from Liberia to Zimbabwe -– in one case amounting to a fifth of a country’s landmass.
African governments would safeguard forests for a share of revenues from carbon credit sales, benefits for communities and help fighting deforestation. It was promoted as a win-win.
But more two years on, Liberia’s Blue Carbon deal has stalled. Other accords across Africa and elsewhere have also gone nowhere, while the UAE company itself appears to have fallen silent, according to a joint investigation by AFP and Code for Africa, an investigative organisation.
“It was stopped,” Elijah Whapoe, Liberia’s National Climate Change Steering Committee (NCCSC) coordinator, told AFP when asked about the status of the Blue Carbon agreement.
“As we speak, there is no attempt to my knowledge, anything, about trying to resuscitate it.”
Blue Carbon’s Africa venture highlights the complexity of delivering on carbon credits, schemes that still lack oversight and are often criticized for offering large polluters a chance to “greenwash” emissions with little or no impact on climate change.
Carbon credits or offsetting allow greenhouse gas producers to “cancel out” some of their emissions by investing in projects that prevent or reduce carbon dioxide production. Forests store huge amounts of carbon dioxide, and protecting them prevents the planet-warming gas from being released.
Most of the Africa agreements were signed before or on the sidelines of the COP28 summit in the United Arab Emirates in 2023. Blue Carbon’s Chairman Sheikh Ahmed Dalmook Al Maktoum, a member of Dubai’s royal family, was often present.
Blue Carbon presented them as a model for carbon trading under the Article 6 of the United Nations climate agreement that was signed in Paris in 2015 and sets the rules for how countries can trade carbon credits.
Blue Carbon also said its work would help the United Arab Emirates achieve its carbon reduction goals, according to a company statement released when it launched in October 2022.
For environmentalists, Blue Carbon’s Africa agreements were at best mismatched with local realities. At worst, critics say, they were a means to allow oil-producer the UAE to earn “green” credentials before hosting the COP28 summit.
Under Liberia’s deal, approximately one million hectares of forests -– around 10 percent of the country’s landmass — would be protected, local communities engaged and the government rewarded 30 percent of revenues in a deal for sustainable forest management, according to a Blue Carbon statement and a preliminary copy of the Memorandum of Understanding seen by AFP.
Like Liberia’s deal, other Africa accords were so-called REDD+ frameworks where some developing countries can receive financing for reducing emissions by stopping deforestation.
But Blue Carbon’s Liberia agreement soon ran into a barrage of criticism from activists and environmentalists who said the deals would trample over local community ownership agreements, undermine existing legal rights and offer little transparency.
Saskia Ozinga, the founder of Fern, an organisation working to protect forests and their communities, said the Blue Carbon deals in Africa were unprecedented in scale, unclear about how they would protect forests and lacked consultations with communities.
“Blue Carbon was clearly aimed to greenwash,” she said. “It was a bizarre idea from many different perspectives, which would have never worked for the climate, for forests and for people.”