According to reports, Liberia is set to hand over control of nearly 10% of its total land mass to a United Arab Emirates-based firm in a massive million-hectare carbon credit deal.
According to a leaked draft of the contract, the deal could override the customary land rights of communities living in vast swaths of the country’s forests.
If signed, the deal would create protected forests for the purpose of generating carbon credits, which could then either be sold on voluntary markets or traded bilaterally between Liberia and other governments looking to meet their emissions targets.
Development and marketing of those credits would be carried out by Blue Carbon, a firm headquartered in Dubai and launched last October by Ahmed Dalmook Al Maktoum, the youngest member of Dubai’s royal family.
The deal with the Liberian government would give it near-total control of the country’s remaining intact rainforests for the next 30 years.
In a public statement, Liberia’s Independent Forest Monitoring Coordinating Mechanism (IFMCM), a group of seven environmental and community rights organizations, acknowledged that the deal could help protect threatened forests.
But it said a blanket transfer of land rights to Blue Carbon in the project areas would violate Liberia’s 2018 Land Rights Law, a hard-fought reform that granted communities ownership of their customary land.
One of Liberia’s opposition parties, the Liberian People’s Party, has called for negotiations between the government and Blue Carbon to be suspended until communities who will be impacted by the deal are consulted. In a statement, 14 environmental organizations from Europe, China, and the U.S. sharply criticized the deal, saying it was “unclear what the benefits for Liberia and its communities will be.
According to the Liberian environmental news publication The Daylight, the country’s top forestry official made an irregular request for Blue Carbon to be able to bypass a competitive bidding process that would normally be required by law.
The potential deal comes amid rising deforestation rates in Liberia, which, according to the World Resources Institute, was the 10th-highest rate of increase of any country between 2020 and 2022. Recent years have also seen shaky application of the rule of law in Liberia’s forestry sector. In March, officials who refused to issue an export permit for illegally felled logs were threatened with jail time by a judge, and The Daylight reported that other permits have been issued outside of a chain-of-custody tracking system required by forestry reform laws.
