First, the little-known Emirati company set its sights on a forest the size of Maine. Then, another one that was big as South Carolina. After that, it focused on a chunk of land the size of Puerto Rico.
As the oil-rich emirate of Dubai prepared to host this year’s United Nations-sponsored climate summit, the company, named Blue Carbon and founded by a prince, was accumulating proposed deals on huge swaths of land across the developing world. It sought to position itself as a force for a purported solution to global warming: carbon credits.
Carbon credits are potentially one of the most important — but also most controversial — tools to speed up efforts to reduce global emissions of heat-trapping gases. The idea is simple: each credit is worth one ton of carbon dioxide emissions that was sequestered or avoided.
In theory, the carbon trade could increase the ambition of industrialized nations by letting them reduce emissions in other countries while figuring out how to do it home. It could also direct funds to developing countries that badly need them to grow their economies sustainably.
But counting greenhouse gas emissions is a complex endeavor.
Many conservationists worry the carbon market could be abused by countries looking to lower emissions without abandoning fossil fuels. Others hope the trade would channel money the developing world needs to keep forests standing and build renewable energy plants.
Blue Carbon is pushing into the business despite unresolved issues of how the market for credits like these should best be structured.
Within the span of a year, Blue Carbon announced agreements with nations in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean to develop huge conservation projects. Their goal was expansive, namely to stop forested land from being cut down and to plant forests in already-logged tracts, and then sell credits based off the expected emissions reductions from those projects to nations that are looking to reduce their carbon footprints.
One ton of carbon stored in trees equals one carbon credit that can be bought and sold.
But what government officials portrayed as a once in a lifetime opportunity for their nations was seen by many conservationists as an uncertain bet to curb carbon emissions with the potential to strip scores of local communities of their land rights.
Carbon markets are still largely unregulated. While they provide a way to marshal money to protect forests, much of the worry over deals like Blue Carbon’s comes down to how little companies have to publicly divulge.
“We need all the financial levers we can get” to protect forests, said Zoe Quiroz-Cullen, a director at Fauna & Flora, an international wildlife nonprofit. But, she added, “I’m not seeing the level of detail that we would expect and for this number of announcements at this kind of scale.”
Most carbon-market activity until now happened between companies seeking to satisfy their voluntary pledges to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
But the trades Blue Carbon wants to broker have much higher stakes. They take advantage of a system created in the landmark Paris climate accord nearly a decade ago that allows nations to trade emission reductions that would count toward the buyer’s own pledge to reach carbon neutrality.
Though countries and companies are starting to make deals, the rules that govern the trade remain unwritten. Negotiators at the recently concluded COP28 summit in Dubai failed once again to agree on a framework for regulating the trades, largely over questions of how they would report the emissions reductions of their projects.
“We want and need countries and their partners to be very clear and transparent about what it is they’re doing,” said Alexia Kelly, who was a lead negotiator for the United States on emissions trading and markets provisions of the Paris Agreement. “But absent any kind of agreed rules, that may or may not be occurring.”
The terms of Blue Carbon’s proposed deals were not released publicly. Its draft contract with Liberia’s government, reviewed by the Times, shows the company wouldn’t buy any land, but instead secure the right to sell carbon credits from areas that are currently occupied by communities, private farms and reserves.
President Emmerson Mnangagwa of Zimbabwe touted an agreement in September that could give control of almost a fifth of the country’s territory to Blue Carbon. At a recent ceremony he said that the deal would close the country’s “financing gap to the tune of $200 million.”
Requests for information on the agreements went unanswered by Blue Carbon and the office of its founder, Sheikh Ahmed Dalmook Al Maktoum, as well as four of the five African nations with deals.
Reaching an agreement to regulate country-to-country trades has taken on…
Read More: Blue Carbon Is One of Many Companies Inking Carbon Market Deals