The United Arab Emirates are buying African forests

Ahmed Dalmook al Maktoum, the youngest of the Dubai royal family, seems to want to take over all of Africa.Blue Carbon, the company he leads, is financing projects which, on paper, should protect forests in exchange for carbon credits to be resold, but which in practice sound like one of the most large greenwashing operations.

For example, the sheikh will be able to boast conservation rights over approximately 20% of the green areas of Zimbabwe and 10% of Liberia, but the agreements have affected various areas of the continent:to such an extent that the Emirates found themselves at manage 60 million acres of African forest.Numbers that have made Blue Carbon one of the largest and most critical carbon credit companies.Let's explain what it is.

To reduce the polluting impact of their operations, many companies and governments around the world have decided to offset the carbon emissions produced financing projects elsewhere clean, sustainable.An exchange validated by the purchase of (at least) one carbon credit, which is equivalent to buying the authorization to emit one ton of carbon dioxide or the equivalent quantity of a different greenhouse gas.In practice, how explains Irpimedia, «one ton of carbon dioxide (CO2) released by an oil field in Congo is equalized by the removal of the same quantity of polluting gases thanks, for example, to the energy produced by a solar park in India».A mechanism that if interpreted - and therefore used - in the wrong way, as often happens, grants the company the freedom possibility of continuing to pollute without necessarily having to change one's structure and/or working method, because the reduction of one's emissions is entrusted to someone else.

In fact, although carbon credit projects were designed to support the economic independence of developing countries - the main stakeholders involved - and provide them with sufficient resources to protect the territory, in reality the mismanagement and poor regulation of market have made the practice subtle and harmful.From being "nature-based", as the Northern Rangelands Trust, which deals with the protection of Kenya, defined it, the carbon credit market instead turned out to be "fragmented and without a supervisory authority, a deep web e-commerce», said in the words of Irpi.A business of protected areas that Survival International has been dealing with for some time now, and which in its latest denunciation campaign entitled Bloody carbon described it as an operation that could greatly increase the financing of human rights violations of indigenous peoples, without doing anything to combat climate change.And without any benefit - which was one of the main objectives of the agreement - for the local communities.

Since the United Arab Emirates Carbon Alliance has said it wants to buy carbon credits for 450 million dollars by 2030, Blue Carbon will certainly not be the only player in the exchanges.For now, his dominance in the market is undisputed, as are the sheikh's interests in oil and gas – great sources of wealth for his family.

On the other hand, the Emirates - let us remember - will host this year's United Nations Conference on Climate Change, chaired by Ahmed Al Jaber, CEO of the fossil giant Abu Dhabi National Oil Company who has proposed to increase investments in fossil fuels by 600 billion dollars a year - they are unlikely to achieve the set climate objectives.

Especially taking into account that in 2022 the use of fossil fuels it generated 218.8 million tons across the country of carbon dioxide emissions, with an increase of over 2% compared to the previous year and that in the same year the per capita emissions of CO₂ are among the highest in the world, with more than 20 tonnes per person.

[by Gloria Ferrari]