The United Arab Emirates, where we are right now, is using its vast oil money to buy up the rights to land in many African countries in order to sell carbon credits to major polluters. Just over a year ago, in 2022, a member of the UAE royal family set up a private investment company called Blue Carbon to facilitate the deals. The company is negotiating to purchase the rights to about a tenth of Liberia’s land mass, a fifth of Zimbabwe’s, and swaths of Kenya, Zambia and Tanzania. The Guardian newspaper reports the deal involves land about the size of the United Kingdom. Blue Carbon would then sell carbon credits linked to forests preserved on this land. Many critics have likened the UAE’s plan to a new form of colonialism.
what they’re doing, effectively, after failing to mitigate at the source, is buy what they call carbon credits, but, in fact, those are just permits to pollute. So, rather than actually containing emissions and cutting them at the source so that we can decarbonize and be able to help the world hold climate hitting to below 1.5 degrees, what they’re doing is buying large tracks of land in Africa so that they can have a pipeline of, you know, permits that gives them the right to continue to pollute at the source.
So, if you look at it, you know, the continent of Africa,
— source democracynow.org | Dec 06, 2023