Gabon plans the world’s biggest ever issue of carbon credits. By logging its forests

By Chris Lang

Last week, Gabon’s Forestry Minister, Lee White, announced that Gabon aims to create 187 million carbon credits, 90 million of which would be sold on the offsets market. It would be the world’s biggest ever issue of carbon credits.

Gabon joins the Commonwealth

White made the announcement on the sidelines of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Rwanda. During the meeting, Gabon was accepted as members of the Commonwealth. The vast majority of countries in the Commonwealth were colonised during the British Empire. Gabon was a colony of France.

In order to join the Commonwealth, according to the Commonwealth’s press statement about Gabon, “an applicant country should demonstrate commitment to democracy and democratic processes, including free and fair elections and representative legislatures; the rule of law and independence of the judiciary; good governance, including a well-trained public service and transparent public accounts; and protection of human rights, freedom of expression, and equality of opportunity”.

It’s difficult to see how Gabon convinced anyone of any of this. Since 1967, Gabon has had two presidents. Until 2009, Omar Bongo was president. When he died, his son Ali Bongo took over. Protests took place after Ali Bongo was elected in 2009, and again in 2016. The BBC notes that Bongo narrowly won in 2016, “amid accusations of fraud and acts of violence”.

The Economist goes further:

The Bongo family has run Gabon as a patronage-ridden fief for 54 years; no one pretends it is a democracy. At its most recent election, in 2016, it was obvious that the main challenger, Jean Ping, had won hands down.

Oil accounts for 80% of export revenue in Gabon. During COP26 in Glasgow, the Economist described Gabon’s hopes of selling the carbon stored in its forests as follows:

Gabon, a small, family-run petrostate in west Africa, might seem a rather odd campaigner against global warming. Once Africa’s fifth-largest oil exporter, it profited by helping the world pump more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Now, however, it hopes to benefit from helping the world to avoid overheating instead, by encouraging rich countries to pay African ones to keep their forests standing.

Gabon “working with UNFCCC’s REDD mechanism”

White says that Gabon wants to “harvest its forests sustainably to generate income”.

According to Bloomberg, White explains that Gabon is working with the UNFCCC’s REDD mechanism to create the credits.

Gabon is a member of the Coalition for Rainforest Nations. Although in this case, there is no signed agreement between Gabon and CfRN, White’s announcement seems similar to the one that CfRN signed last year with Papua New Guinea.

CfRN announced that,

CfRN member country Gabon just announced that it aims to create 187 million carbon credits, almost half of which may be sold on the offsets market in what would be the single largest issuance in history.

Bloomberg estimates that the carbon offsets that Gabon hopes to sell could be worth about US$291 million. “Such a large issuance,” Bloomberg notes, “if done all at once, could flood the $1 billion market.”

Overlap with CAFI, or just double counting?

In September 2019, Gabon signed a US$150 million REDD deal with the Central African Forest Initiative. Under this deal, the so-called “payments for performance” are calculated under the Architecture for REDD+ Transactions certification scheme. This method of calculating avoided emissions is completely different to the UNFCCC mechanism.

It remains to be seen exactly how Gabon will attempt to fudge the issue of double counting of its REDD credits.

Between 2019 and 2029, Gabon could receive up to US$150 million under the deal. In July 2021, Gabon received the first payment of US$17 million from the Norwegian government, despite the fact that deforestation is increasing in the country.

White says that preserving forests is “almost a moral responsibility”. But as a report by Muyissi Environnement (Gabon) and World Rainforest Movement points out, 60% of the roads in Gabon are logging roads and 44% of the country’s forests have been handed over to the logging industry as timber concessions.

TotalEnergies and Compagnie des Bois du Gabon

In June 2022, French oil company TotalEnergies announced that it had bought 49% of logging company Compagnie des Bois du Gabon. The company has 600,000 hectares of logging concessions in Gabon. TotalEnergies claims that it can generate carbon credits from CBG’s logging operations “thanks to the reduced impact of forest operations, reforestation, agroforestry and conservation of natural forests”, in line with the “Green Gabon” vision of the Gabonese government.

“Greenwash Gabon” would have been a better name for the idea of logging the forests to create carbon offsets for a massively polluting oil corporation like TotalEnergies, which has been drilling oil in Gabon for more than 80 years.

Nevertheless, White is worried about TotalEnergies’ interest in Gabon’s forest carbon. He told Bloomberg that,

“I’m not totally convinced their carbon credit model works. They don’t have the rights to the carbon in the ground and we’re relying on concessions to produce timber to fuel our timber transformation industry. If suddenly I’ve got lots of investors in carbon wanting to retire all my forestry concessions, I’ve got a problem.”

White’s concern is that TotalEnergies may convince CBG to reduce the amount of logging in its concessions. Bloomberg reports that according to White, “selective logging can encourage more carbon capture in the long run than no logging at all because it allows light to reach the forest floor, which in turn stimulates more tree growth”.

White adds that,

“If they reduce the amount of logging they do over 25 years, we might actually end up having less carbon stored than we would have had had we done more classic selective logging.”

Gabon and the African Conservation Development Group

The Gabonese government has a very similar deal with a company called the African Conservation Development Group. The country has handed over 731,000 hectares to the company to develop the land “sustainably” for commercial agriculture, forestry and tourism under a project called the Grande Mayumba project.

The African Conservation Development Group was previously called SFM Africa, and was founded by Alan Bernstein, whose companies were involved in a web of offshore companies involved in selling carbon credits, transfer pricing, and tax avoidance. Prince Charles was one of the investors in Bernstein’s company Sustainable Forestry Management Ltd, which was incorporated in October 1999 in the tax haven of the Bahamas.

While the African Conservation Development Group is registered in the tax haven of Mauritius, another company called the African Conservation Development Group (UK) Ltd was registered with Companies House on 29 July 2021. Bernstein is a director. A company called Sustainable Investments Enterprises Ltd, registered in the tax haven of the British Virgin Islands, has significant control over the company.

The Grande Mayumba project started in 2011 when SFM Africa set up the Grande Mayumba Development Company as a public-private partnership. Very little information about the project is publicly available. Communities living in and around the project area say they have never seen a detailed map of the concession area, and are unaware of any consultation process about the project.

Bernstein hopes to finance the project by selling US$300 million worth of green bonds – to polluting corporations that want to offset their greenhouse gas emissions. The project aims to establish sugar and rubber plantations, fishing, forestry, and cattle ranching operations, and eco-tourism for the super rich.

In March 2022, African Conservation Development Group announced a new company called African Equatorial Hardwoods, the result of a merger between Grande Mayumba Development Co. and Cora Wood Gabon, which is part of the Italian logging company Cora Group. African Equatorial Hardwood plans to build a new US$34 million timber-processing factory in southern Gabon by 2026.

Muyissi Environnement (Gabon) and World Rainforest Movement point out the neocolonialism underlying the idea of generating offsets from Gabon’s forests in order to allow oil extraction and pollution as usual in the Global North:

Obviously, offsetting isn’t just as good as putting an end to destroying underground carbon deposits. In fact, offsetting means communities whose land is destroyed by coal mines and oil fields will continue to be exposed to violence and toxic pollution that are inextricably linked with fossil fuel extraction. Offsetting also means that the communities whose neighbourhood is impacted by refineries continue to be exposed to devastating health impacts. And offsetting means more land at the offsetting end of the equation is being controlled to serve the interests of corporations – as carbon stores, in this case – while peasant families and forest peoples are told to stop cultivating food in the forest.

In November 2021, the Collective of Upper and Lower Banio communities in Nyanga province, Gabon, released the Bana / Mayumba Declaration calling for the suspension of the Grande Mayumba project.