Inclusive carbon land deals?
As 2024 drew to a close, the International Land Coalition (ILC), whose membership runs from government-funded agencies like the World Bank and the WWF to groups like Slow Food or ROPPA (the West African family farmers network), widely circulated a new report. The report argues that data supplied by ILC partners, combined with improved land rights, can turn today's massive land grab for carbon offset projects into a win-win situation. This is delusional and wrong.
The publication, Africa’s carbon land deals and the hidden tenure challenge, begins by summarising the vast amount of evidence that shows how communities in Africa are being displaced and harmed by carbon markets, and how carbon offset projects are a dangerous distraction from real solutions to the climate crisis. It highlights how one in four people in Africa (26%) live in fear that they will be pushed off their land, and stresses that evidence is pouring in about rural communities being directly threatened by carbon offset projects. But it then pivots, arguing that the data collected on one case in Ghana by ILC's partner, the Land Matrix, is proof that good land governance can "enable sustainable and inclusive carbon deals".
The data that the Land Matrix, a database on large scale land deals, has on this large-scale tree plantation by the UK-based Miro Forestry in Ghana is shoddy. It is missing at least five publications available online that list harms caused to local communities, including a lawsuit brought against the company by over 100 local farmers for having destroyed their farms. (See box.) The ILC claim that "in the case of Miro Forestry, the land rights of the local communities were not affected, and nobody was evicted" is simply not true.
In September 2024, GRAIN released a data set of hundreds of land deals for carbon offset plantations around the world concluded since 2016, including deals covering over 5.2 million hectares in Africa. One of our major take-aways from this research was that there is very little public information about most projects, and that the information that exists is mostly propaganda from the promoters. The absence of information online about harms does not prove that harms are not happening. In fact, the small number of independent, on-the-ground investigations that have been done into these projects have almost always exposed major problems and serious harms caused to local communities.
But it's not just a data issue. The ILC is trying to make the case that weak land rights is the problem, and not the strategy of assigning massive amounts of land in Africa to produce carbon offsets for an unregulated international market that serves foreign corporations and does nothing to address the climate crisis. Taking land away from people to produce a spurious new commodity – whose price the directly impacted communities do not control – is never a good idea, no matter the legal framework. The ILC's fixation with land rights and its inflated sense of its own data appear to have blinded it to this simple fact.
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