Must Africa Wait for Altruism to Be Paid for Its Carbon?

In the villages around Kyekyewre, in Ghana's Eastern Region, charcoal is not an abstraction. It is a sack sold at the roadside, a smoke that stings the eyes before dawn, a small sum of money in a place where salaries are rare. A stand of bamboo or a mature hardwood is the nearest thing many households have to a bank account, and like any savings it is drawn down suddenly, when something must be paid. That is the honest arithmetic behind most tree felling. It is not ignorance of the value of forests.

Set against that arithmetic a set of numbers from the other end of the world's ledger. Biochar carbon removal credits have been trading at roughly $136 a tonne. In the first half of this year, buyers contracted some $806 million of biochar offtake, according to figures compiled by Sylvera. The conditions attached to that money are demanding: a hundred years of permanence, transparent measurement and reporting, and a supplier with a record of delivery.

Two worlds, one transaction, and the vocabulary between them is wrong. We speak of helping rural Africa to adapt, of patient and altruistic capital flowing southward. But the commodity at stake is one the industrial north cannot produce for itself, which is the removal and durable storage of carbon. A village with bamboo, a kiln and a buyer is not a charity case. It is a supplier.

Ghana is not waiting to be discovered. In December 2022 it became the first country in the world to issue a formal authorisation for the transfer of mitigation outcomes under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement. It has cooperative approaches with Switzerland, Sweden and Singapore, with South Korea close behind, and a cookstove programme expected to deliver some 3.2 million tonnes of emission reductions. Digital measurement and reporting is now part of the national architecture. Whatever else may be said, the plumbing exists.

The objection must be met head on, because it is serious. Carbon markets have earned their reputation for wishful accounting. Offsets have served as indulgences, allowing a polluter in one country to buy the appearance of virtue while changing nothing at home. The cookstove route in particular has drawn questions about transparency and about whether the stoves sold are genuinely additional or merely cheaper. And every new market in African land carries the risk that the credit is earned in the north while the land is mortgaged in the south. These are not objections to be waved away with talk of innovation.

But notice what they are objections to. They are objections to bad contracts, not to commerce as such. The remedy for a badly structured market is a better structure: ownership in local hands, measurement that an independent auditor can verify, and a share of the price going to the people whose land and labour produced the tonne. The remedy for exploitation is not alms. Alms leave the terms of the transaction exactly where they were.

This is where the moral vocabulary of development fails us. Altruism is a mood, and moods pass with budgets. The phrase ethically anchored, patient capital sounds warm and behaves unpredictably: it arrives with a theory of change, a reporting template designed for a foundation's board, and a three-year horizon that expires with the programme officer who championed it. A contract behaves differently. It names a tonnage, a price, a date and a penalty, and it outlives a change of government in the donor country.

The phrase shared value, which Michael Porter and Mark Kramer introduced fifteen years ago, promised that firms could profit by addressing social problems. In too many places it has come to mean a corporation capturing the value and calling the residue shared. There is a simple test, and it is financial rather than rhetorical. Is there an invoice? Is there an equity stake? Are the accounts audited and shown to the families whose land produced the tonne? If the answer to those questions is no, then what is being shared is a press release.

Here I will disappoint the romantics, myself included. A project that proposes charcoal briquettes, biochar and biodegradable hemp plastics in a single breath is three businesses wearing one coat. Briquettes compete with charcoal at the household level on price and distribution. Biochar is an agricultural input and a carbon asset carrying its own verification costs. Hemp plastics require plant, process and buyers, and in Ghana industrial hemp is licence-gated in any case. An investor who reads all three in one sentence concludes that no choice has yet been made. Sequence is credibility, and the briquettes and the biochar, which share a feedstock and a kiln, must come first.

What follows is unglamorous and decisive. Measurement that a remote verifier can trust. A buyer committed in advance to a tonnage, a species, a price and a date. A kiln or a nursery whose cash is recorded, banked and shown to the families each season. A governance structure that gives those families a share rather than a wage. None of this makes a photograph worth taking. All of it is what separates a bankable project from an appealing one, and it is precisely what keeps a carbon scheme from becoming the next land grab.

There is a deeper claim here that the development literature tends to soften. A forest is protected by the people who live beside it, and they will protect it only when the standing tree is worth more to them than the felled one. No quantity of conservation rhetoric alters that arithmetic. An honest carbon price does. It converts a tree from a thing to be spent into a thing that pays, year after year, without being cut.

So the question above is not rhetorical. Africa will not be paid for its carbon out of conscience, because conscience is not a funding line and never has been. It will be paid when it comes to the table as a supplier with measured tonnage and a signed offtake, and when the wealthiest buyers discover that some of the most reliable removals on earth are being delivered by some of the poorest producers. That is not charity. It is trade, and it is long overdue.