Colonial conservation at work: Mangrove replanting in Sénégal for carbon offsets

The Senegalese villagers who did most of the work saw about 5% of the money.

In the 1970s, a series of droughts hit the Sahel region in Africa. The droughts caused famine, malnutrition and dramatic food price increases. In Sénégal, the droughts also killed off more than one-third of the country’s mangrove forests. The mangroves have also suffered from wood collection and road-building.

Decades later, the mangroves had not been replanted. But then in 2006, the Senegalese NGO Océanium started replanting mangroves on an area of 173 hectares.

The French food-products corporation Danone supported the replanting. Then, the Paris-based Livelihoods Funds supported the project. The project now covers 10,000 hectares. 79 million mangroves have been planted. Livelihoods Funds calls it “the world’s largest mangrove reforestation project”.

The project generates carbon credits, which have been bought by 10 European companies including Danone and the luxury clothing firm Hermès.

The Livelihoods Funds, which was created by Danone, has 20 other firms investing in it, including Hermès, Michelin, KfW, Crédit Agrocole, and Mars.

The project was certified as a Clean Development Mechanism project in 2011. Support has also come from IUCN and the Ramsar Convention.

Recently Hakai Magazine published an article titled, “The Social Cost of Carbon Credits”, that takes a close look at this mangrove planting project.

Journalist Jack Thompson travelled around the Saloum delta where the project is based and interviewed villagers who planted mangroves under the project. He found that many felt exploited. He writes that,

International companies and NGOs pay local workers substandard wages, obscure their own finances, and rarely involve communities in project designs. Local communities also receive no share of the revenue generated by the projects they contribute to, aside from meager wages for planting mangroves.

Oysters and ark clams

Villagers collect oysters and ark clams from the mangroves. Thompson speaks to Hélène Sonko who supports her family and send her five children to school by selling shellfish. On a good day she can earn between US$8 and US$30.

Sonko belongs to Mboga Yaye, a local women’s cooperative, which processes shellfish and sells them to residents, hotels, and tourists. Members of the cooperative have also built beehives to produce and sell honey, which reduces pressure on the shellfish stocks.

Thompson notes that mangrove restoration does provide benefits for communities: more oysters, shrimp, and fish; and more habitat for honeybees.

Just over 5% of project funding went to communities

But when she started planting mangrove trees Sonko was paid just 2,000 Communauté Financière Africaine francs (CFA francs) per day. That’s about US$3.

“2,000 CFA is not good,” Sonko told Thompson. Women started work at 5 am. They often cut themselves on sharp shells and roots. “We did it for the love of the mangroves,” Sonko says.

Thompson writes that,

The women didn’t know that the money they were paid had originally come from wealthy European companies. If they had, perhaps they would have asked for more compensation.

Livelihoods Funds told Thompson that the project budget was US$4.4 million. This was paid to Océanium to carry out the project and to oversee the carbon accounting over a 20-year period.

Thompson’s investigations reveal that communities were paid 10,000 CFA francs (US$22) per hectare restored. That comes to 5.2% of the total US$4.4 million project budget.

And that’s excluding the money that the project earned from selling carbon offsets.

Livelihoods Funds tells Thompson that Océanium did not want women to plant mangroves just to make money. Océanium wanted communities to take ownership over the restoration.

Sonko and other villagers that Thompson spoke to say they were not consulted about the project design. Their knowledge about the mangrove ecosystems was just ignored.

Planting monocultures

Marie Christine Cormier-Salem is a senior researcher at the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development. She has researched Sénégall’s mangroves for several decades.

She is critical of the mangrove replanting project.

Thompson writes that she described “communities’ anger over monoculture planting, low pay, and the way the work commoditized a communal resource for private gain”.

Cormier-Salem told Thompson that the project ignores who Senegalese people are, “what their needs are, and their aspirations”.

Océanium planted only one species of mangrove in a large part of the project area. Previously, seven species from four genera grew in the Saloum delta.

Sonko tells Thompson that the mangroves are more like a plantation that a natural ecosytem. “There’s nothing natural about it,” Sonko says.

Cormier-Salem tells Thompson that the monoculture plantation will be more at risk of disease, extreme weather, and ecological changes caused by the climate crisis.

Thompson writes that studies show that the mangrove species that has been planted in the Saloum delta, from the genus Rhizophora, is slowing or blocking natural regeneration of other mangrove species. Planting the more resilient species Avicennia would make more sense. But Avicennia is considerably more expensive because it has to be grown in a nursery before it can be planted out.

Thompson notes that this is yet another conservation project in Africa run on the colonial model. Local communities work for a pittance to supply a commodity to the Global North.

In this case, the commodity is carbon offsets.

Carbon auditors are expensive

A former employee of Océanium tells Thompson that a significant amount of the project budget went on carbon auditors.

Gilles Dufrasne of Carbon Market Watch confirms that verification and auditing is one of the biggest expenses of carbon projects. He tells Thompson that the expense of verification and auditing would be “defensible if they were a bulletproof that guaranteed the integrity of credits, but we know they aren’t”.

One of the most egregious examples of auditors failing to pick up on serious problems over a period of many years, is the Kasigau Corridor REDD project, where auditors failed to uncover sexual harassment and the systemic abuse of power going back to 2011.

This, however, is far from an isolated example.

Dufrasne also notes that carbon trading does not require financial transparency. So it’s difficult to work out where the money’s going.

This project is funded by Livelihood Funds. Further money comes from sales of carbon credits. But how the money is distributed between Océanium, carbon consultants, local NGOs, and workers doing the planting is completely opaque.

Dufrasne suggests that companies could directly finance nature restoration projects without attaching carbon offsets to the projects.

Frédéric Mousseau, policy director at the US-based think tank the Oakland Institute, tells Thompson that a far better solution than carbon trading would be to tax companies that pollute and use that money to help address systemic injustices.

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