Imperialism is the Arsonist of Our Forests

In the same year, the exuberance of carbon markets reached its pinnacle with several African countries striking deals to concede vast sections of their forests to UAE, Europe, and US-based corporations to extract and trade carbon credits. These deals cover land masses of 20 per cent of Zimbabwe, 10 per cent of Liberia, 10 per cent of Zambia, and 10 per cent of Tanzania and more contracts are expected to come from other countries. In Kenya, the government signed a controversial deal conceding millions of hectares of the Mau forest leading to the forced evictions of the Ogiek community. In Senegal, large-scale reforestation projects covering 25 per cent of the mangrove forests of the Saloum Delta, one of the largest wetlands in West Africa, are slated to turn into carbon deals financed by oil giant, Shell. These are just a few cases in one long string of deals to meet the growing demand for conservation-area-based carbon markets and nature-based solutions to address climate change.

Numerous reports emerged in the last year documenting the devastating impacts of carbon and biodiversity offset projects on local communities. The Oakland Institute report presents several case studies of offset deals by investment firms in East Africa, including Sydney-based New Forest with a portfolio of 1.27 million hectares of land. The reports mark the massive expansion of carbon offsetting activities on the continent causing violent evictions, disseminating livelihoods and increasing carbon emissions as very alarming. In short, the report asserts that carbon and biodiversity offset is nothing more than the ‘latest frontier of green colonialism’ that sustain the exploitative economic structures fuelling the environmental catastrophe globally.

These condemnations are essential in highlighting the urgency to reposition the trajectory of the international climate agenda to usher in more just and equitable transitions in Africa. African activists have done well bringing these issues to the forefront of international negotiations like the Conference of the Parties on Climate (COP28) and Biological Diversity (COP15). However, pan-African feminist writer and activist, Rosebell Kagumire, reminds us that climate negotiations remain a space where established power is reasserted, noting:

The commitments made by rich and power-hoarding nations so far have not been nearly deep enough to make the radical shift needed to slow the warming of the globe. The long-term needs of marginalized populations in the Majority World are too often subject to intense debate and little outcome.

Kagumire’s powerful argument points to a critical issue that many African scholars and grassroots activists have long spoken about. That is, the international climate agenda serves to maintain, what Marxist economist giants, Walter Rodney and Samir Amin, skilfully described as the underdevelopment of African countries that is foundational to the economic growth of the imperialist core. After all, if climate actions have so far led to the violent dispossession of Africans to integrate vast swaths of lands into global markets, while no sacrifice of such scale is imposed on countries of the Global North, what should that tell us about where the loyalty of the climate agenda lies? The late Zimbabwean land reform activist, Sam Moyo, captured this well, noting that ‘ecological imperialism and the effects of “North” driven climate-change agenda are marshalled against agrarian development from below’ which seeks to reserve more African land and biodiversity for external forces.

At a moment of emerging political and economic interests as well as geopolitical realignment against the backdrop of a rapidly changing natural environment, it is crucial to fully grasp how the international climate agenda functions within these shifting global structures. Equally important is to draw from anti-imperialist and grassroots thoughts and practice to advance a discursive terrain for an authentic African climate agenda first and foremost predicated on our right to meaningful development.

Essentially, carbon and biodiversity offset schemes are premised on the idea that rangelands, forests, mangroves and other important ecosystems of the Global South can serve as carbon sinks and neutralize the ecological effects of the unsustainable economic growth in the Global North. The 2022 Land Gap Report estimates that the total area of land needed to meet climate pledges is almost 1.2 billion hectares globally. Consequently, conservation areas in Africa, from which states evict local communities and set aside for protection, are increasingly enrolled in carbon and biodiversity offsets in exchange for economic benefits. However, for agrarian communities, the foregone social, cultural and economic values of conservation areas including food security, water for irrigation and hydroelectricity cannot be overstated and defy any calculation.

Despite the damning evidence of their impacts, African governments and environmental organizations present offset deals as a mechanism to generate revenues for communities but so far, the benefits remain elusive. For example, in Senegal, some communities in the Saloum Delta have been able to generate income by supplying propagules for the mangrove reforestation campaign organized by Wetlands International, the French Development Agency and carbon credit broker, We Forest. However, local officials shared with me concerns that this income is used to obtain the buy-in of impoverished communities. There is also great uncertainty about their capacity to generate revenues or access resources after the deal is signed between the government and the carbon buyer. It may be too early to know for sure if, in the long run, offset deals will deliver on their economic promises for local communities. But the record from over three decades of conservation and development schemes can help us gauge their possible trajectories.

Carbon and biodiversity offsets have existed in different forms since the 1990s as part of a host of integrated conservation and development programs (ICDP), advanced by international environmental agencies and implemented mostly in the Global South. They are market-based approaches designed to channel economic benefits for community development while preserving the natural environment. Such programmes include tourism-based conservation projects, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (REDD+) and Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES). In reality, except for PES which works directly with farmers and landowners, most ICDP schemes demand that local communities cede control of their land and resources in exchange for employment and vital public services for communities already living under the weight of state-sanctioned deprivation. Nigerian environmental researcher, Adeniyi Asiyanbi, has demonstrated how REDD+ facilitate a regime of forest militarization that curtails local resource access while driving elite accumulation in timber forestry. Similarly, my research among many other studies, shows that in most of Africa, tourism-driven conservation programmes, give greater advantage to private tour operators, while undermining local resource use practices and entrepreneurial activities, thereby exacerbating structural inequities.

The ascendency of the finance world through carbon deals and other nature-based solutions comes at a crucial juncture of the climate and biodiversity crises marking a turning point in capitalist capture of the environmental agenda. Environmental anthropologist, Sian Sullivan, maintains that the carbon offset market, as with any new frontier, enables the penetration of finance capital into an expanding array of environmental conservation niches. She argues that this involves a discursive framing of nature using financial terms that reorganize conserved nature into concepts that can be productively aligned with finance. Economic concepts, such as assets, natural capital and green growth were often invoked to justify market-oriented climate solutions at the ACS. This discursive framing of nature, as Sullivan explains, rationalizes human and non-human natures to conform to an economic system that privileges market-oriented values over the distributive and sustainable logics of endogenous socioeconomic processes.