Liberia to Concede Territory to UAE Firm in Carbon Offset Deal

DUBAI (Middle East Eye) – A carbon offset deal could see Liberia concede 10 percent of its territory to a private Emirati company, extinguishing customary land rights and giving the United Arab Emirates (UAE) pollution rights equivalent to the forest’s carbon sequestration.

The deal would give the company blanket control over one million hectares of forest. The company would then “harvest” carbon credits, supposedly from restoring and protecting the land, which they would then sell onto major polluters to offset their emissions.
If signed, the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) would violate a number of Liberian laws, including the 2019 land rights law, a legislation that asserts communities’ right to “customary land”.
It would also concede near total control of one of the most densely forested territories in Africa to the Dubai-based firm Blue Carbon for a period of 30 years.
Additionally, the deal would prevent Liberia from using the land to meet its own international climate targets.
Up until recently, the agreement was shrouded in secrecy; while the MoU was concluded in March, with the final draft to be signed imminently, local NGOs were reportedly unaware of the contract until government sources leaked the news.
“We only got to know about the draft agreement a few weeks ago,” Jonathan Yiah of the Sustainable Development Institute (SDI), a member of Liberia’s Independent Forest Monitoring Coordinating Mechanism (IFMCM), a consortium of seven environmental and community rights organizations, told Middle East Eye.
Following the leak, the government scrambled to invite local stakeholders to meetings. But the SDI reported that participants were only sent the draft contract a day before the first meeting, with subsequent meetings rescheduled at the last minute.
“The government was behaving as if there was no time,” Yiah told MEE.
For Paul Kanneh, another IFMCM campaigner, the upcoming Liberian elections in October suggest that government officials were in a hurry to pocket the initial upfront payment of $50m, an amount revealed in the leak.
“Generally speaking, I can deduce that the government wants money,” he told MEE.
The IFMCM immediately raised the alarm once the news was leaked, publishing a statement on their site.