2023-09-21 17:00:23
Zambia, a landlocked and heavily indebted country in southern Africa, announced on September 11 the signing of an agreement with two Chinese companies with the stated aim of protecting or restoring its forest cover over 40,000 square kilometers, or approximately 5% of its territory. At the beginning of 2023, a similar contract covering an area twice as large was signed with the Emirati company Blue Carbon. This company, owned by Ahmed Dalmook Al Maktoum, a member of the ruling family of Dubai, where the next world climate conference will take place in December, has also taken positions in Liberia, over 10,000 square kilometers, and in Tanzania , over 80,000 square kilometers. Each of these projects, which combine initiatives to combat deforestation, reforestation or industrial planting, should make it possible to generate millions of carbon credits. Each credit theoretically corresponds to one ton of CO2 sequestered or not released into the atmosphere thanks to the actions carried out.
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These examples are only the most recent illustrations of the race in which African countries have decided to engage to carve out a place for themselves in carbon trading. The ambition is not new, but the results obtained have so far remained insignificant. Of the approximately 3,300 projects identified around the world by the American NGO Forest Trends, barely a hundred are located on the continent and concentrated in a handful of countries, led by Kenya.
At the end of 2022, an Initiative for Carbon Markets in Africa was launched, with the objective of producing 300 million annual credits in voluntary offset markets by 2030 and 1.5 billion by 2050, translating the will to “make carbon credits one of Africa’s leading export products”. Since then, around twenty countries have joined the initiative, financed in particular by the American Agency for International Development and influential American foundations (Bezos Earth Fund, Rockefeller, Bill & Melinda Gates). During the first African climate summit, organized in early September in Nairobi, John Kerry once again encouraged turning to market mechanisms: “We need carbon markets more than ever to achieve our goals of decarbonizing the global economy”repeated the special envoy for the climate of the American president, Joe Biden.
A source of income
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, the threshold beyond which scientists anticipate a runaway climate with consequences that are difficult to control. The current trajectory of emissions leads to an increase of between 2.6°C and 2.8°C.
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