Deconstructing and Debunking False Solutions: REDD+ and Carbon Markets in Africa

African natural resources and biodiversity are being promoted as central tools of the market-based solutions to the current environmental crisis, particularly through REDD+ and the production of carbon credits. The recently created African Carbon Markets Initiative (ACMI) aims to accelerate the growth of Voluntary Carbon Markets (VCM) in Africa and to drive a dramatic increase in the production of African carbon credits to one of the most exported commodities of the continent (ACMI, 2022). Projects and financing mechanisms are being implemented with the aim of “producing” carbon credits, including land-based carbon sequestration projects (such as REDD+ for conservation and reforestation), blue carbon (carbon based on coastal and marine ecosystems), projects aiming changes in traditional production techniques and systems (such as Climate-Smart Agriculture), projects promoting “more sustainable” ways of living of rural households (use of greener devices, such as highly efficient coal stoves or solar home systems).

Research shows adverse impacts to rural livelihoods and subsistence. This highly relates to green extractivism, where emission rights are expropriated and extracted from rural households in favor of external actors’ compensation of emissions. Under green extractivism, rural households are not only being deprived of resources determinant for their livelihoods, having their labor further exploited but also being deprived of their ability to rightfully use and benefit from ecological assets – the right to emit (Bruna, 2022). At the end of the day, these green policies and solutions are feeding capital accumulation of the very same actors that are historically responsible for the climate crisis. These solutions rely on the same exploitative and asymmetric economic, social and ecological exchange relations that created and reproduced the current crisis and the historical socioeconomic vulnerability of developing countries.

REDD+ and carbon markets intrinsically carry inefficiencies and injustices in disfavor of African countries. They facilitate green grabbing and green extractivism and because of their legitimation strategies (“the fight against climate change”, “protecting and saving the planet for future generations”, “building resilience”, among others), resisting against that can be challenging.

This report explores and exposes differentiated injustices that climate solutions and carbon markets carry out, and based on that, it suggests that strategies to fight green extractivism and green grabbing should involve deconstructing the “green” legitimation strategies and discourses and debunking the distracting reformisms that are supported by them. There are ineffectivenesses that show that these solutions are not solving what they claim to be solving nor achieving what they claim to be achieving. And this is the key to resist green extractivism.

Some of these were identified and listed, deconstructed and debunked, however, efforts to provide more of evidence-based analysis in other contested terrains are encouraged. Exposing and addressing the socio-environmental ineffectiveness of REDD+ and carbon markets and moving away from distracting reformisms is the key to resisting green grabbing and extractivism.

This report is important as its clearly denounces the merger of REDD-type colonialism with the explosion of the scope and scale of offsets within all ecosystems; and the privatization of living beings and iconic African species like elephants and lions for offsets and the creation of mega, multinational offset “countries” such as the Lion Carbon Kingdom, which include extractivism.

Additionally, two parallel fronts of restrategizing are recommended, both actions from within the existing system and actions towards system change. Pursuing better terms of incorporation within the existing system while parallelly pursuing non-extractivist transformative climate action could help minimize the existing adverse implications on the ground. This includes bargaining for better prices of African carbon credits and better mechanisms of compensation of expropriated households that account for ecological losses.

Lastly, this report has highlighted key new scathing critiques of emblematic African REDD projects like the Kasigua Corridor REDD+ project in Kenya that was denounced by the Kenyan Human Rights Commission for decade-long sexual violence against women, which would be important to include for strategizing and alliance building with other sectors such as African women’s organizations1.

Download the report here in English, French, Portuguese.