Zambia, a landlocked and heavily indebted Central African country, announced on September 11 that it had signed an agreement with two Chinese companies. The stated aim is to protect or restore its forest cover across 40,000 square kilometers, or around 5% of its territory.
At the beginning of 2023, a similar contract covering twice the area had been sealed with the Emirati company Blue Carbon. Blue Carbon is owned by Ahmed Dalmook Al Maktoum, a member of the ruling family of Dubai, where the next world climate conference will be held in December. And it has also secured 10,000 square kilometers in Liberia and 80,000 in Tanzania.
Each of these projects, which combine anti-deforestation, reforestation and industrial plantation initiatives, is expected to generate millions of carbon credits. In theory, each credit corresponds to 1 metric ton of CO2 sequestered or not released into the atmosphere thanks to the measures undertaken.
These examples are just the latest illustrations of the race African countries have decided to enter to stake a place for themselves in the carbon trade. The ambition is not new, but the results so far have been insignificant. Of the 3,300 or so projects listed worldwide by the American NGO Forest Trends, barely a hundred are located on the continent, and they are concentrated in a handful of countries, led by Kenya.
At the end of 2022, an African Carbon Markets Initiative was launched, with the aim of producing 300 million annual credits on voluntary offset markets by 2030 and 1.5 billion by 2050, reflecting the desire to "make carbon credits one of Africa's leading export products."
Since then, some 20 countries have joined the initiative, financed in particular by the American international cooperation agency USAID and influential American foundations (Bezos Earth Fund, Rockefeller, Bill & Melinda Gates). At the first African Climate Summit, held in Nairobi at the beginning of September, John Kerry once again urged people to turn to market mechanisms: "We need the carbon market more than ever" to achieve the goal of decarbonizing the global economy, said US President Joe Biden's special envoy for the climate.
The global assessment of the implementation of the Paris Climate Agreement, published on September 8 by the United Nations, confirmed that the policies deployed since 2015 are largely insufficient to contain the rise in temperatures below 2°C and if possible 1.5°C. These are the thresholds beyond which scientists anticipate a runaway climate with consequences that would be difficult to control. The current trajectory of emissions is leading to a rise of between 2.6°C and 2.8°C.
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