The latest company to come on the “carbon colonialism” stage is Blue Carbon of the United Arab Emirates—host of the ongoing COP28 farce—formed only in 2022 by Sheikh Ahmed Dalmook Al Maktoum, a member of the Dubai Royal Family. In the last year, Blue Carbon (appropriately “BC") has taken control of huge swaths of the African landmass, with known projects in Liberia, Kenya, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Overall, land lost due to offsetting in Africa is now reported to be the size of the U.K., and growing.
Exactly a week following their Oct. 12, 2022 creation, Blue Carbon held a “workshop” for Angolan officials in Dubai and, although no deals were signed, BC reportedly offered to perform a “carbon survey” of the entire nation, to determine the net worth of the country’s carbon stock. A week after that, on Oct. 27, Blue Carbon signed a deal with British Oracle Power, ostensibly “to aid in their [Oracle’s] green hydrogen project in Pakistan,” in the words of BC CEO Josiah Sadaka. Getting closer to the truth was Oracle CEO Naheed Memon, who pointed to the Blue Carbon’s two-week-old “experience in climate change economics,” additionally stating that “Blue Carbon aims to be at the forefront of sustainable climate change investment.” In 2017, S&P Market Intelligence reported that Oracle Power—clearly the source of the economic “experience” in this arrangement—was nothing more than the “rebranded” Oracle Coalfields.
Following that deal with London, BC then went into a flurry of dealmaking in the next 12 months, and—while their first deal was apparently with Papua New Guinea, in November 2022—the primary targets were in Africa. In February 2023, Blue Carbon inked deals with two African countries within 24 hours, Tanzania and then Zambia. The Tanzania deal gave BC control of 8.1 million hectares, nearly 8% of their land area, and in Zambia BC got full control to “create sustainable forest management practices” over another 8 million hectares of forest land, literally 20% of the country’s land area! In August, Middle East Eye reported that a deal for 500,000 hectares was pending with Liberia, and in October another mega-deal for 7.5 million hectares was finalized with Zimbabwe. In September, BC signed an MOU with First Abu Dhabi Bank, to “expedite climate advancements and direct essential green investment capital,” according to coverage, but clearly to handle all the money coming in. On Nov. 5, Blue Carbon took control of 4.2 million hectares in northern Kenya.
On Dec.1, Tanzania signed an offset deal for 1.8 million hectares of land, covering six national parks, with formerly unknown Carbon Tanzania. According to BBC, CT is “a locally-based company,” but one whose three directors happen to be all white Anglo-Saxon types, and which is also “registered in the U.K.” Connections to Blue Carbon are highly suspected, but as yet unproven.
In addition to this “passive genocide” of restricting development on huge swaths of land, separate reports indicate that offsets bought by Blue Carbon (and others) now include active “population removal” clauses in their contracts, giving the new “owners” complete authority over everything on, below and even above the contracted territory. The Kenyan government, for example, reportedly “rammed through” legislation last summer, which stated that the land covered by a carbon trading permit, “includes any area either above or below the land and airspace” of Kenya, “including forests, internal and territorial waters and the seabed underlying these waters.” In early September, Kenya sponsored the inaugural African Climate summit, in which President William Ruto argued for Kenya to be the home for Africa’s first carbon market, and an “Emikrati coalition committed $450 million towards producing offsets on the continent,” according to the Middle East Eye.
Rough estimates of the population involved in the above project areas gives 13 million people over 24.5 million hectares of land (assuming an even population distribution within the countries involved). This would represent that 1% of the population of the entire continent could be “dehoused,” to use the British euphemism adopted during the firebombing campaigns of Germany during World War II. That’s for four African countries. The reality could be even higher.
On Nov. 13, nature watchdog Mongabay blew the whistle on Blue Carbon, calling this the “new scramble for Africa” and “Carbon Colonialism.”
