Crooked Carbon Business: Zambézia Integrated Landscape Management Programme, Mozambique
Deforestation has increased and only about 3% of originally estimated programme benefits have gone to communities, the private sector, district and provincial authorities.
This week’s briefing by Simon Counsell and Jutta Kill looks at the World Bank Forest Carbon Partnership Facility’s Zambézia Integrated Landscape Management Programme in Mozambique.1 The briefing can be downloaded here:
The Zambézia Integrated Landscape Management Programme covers nine districts in the eastern part of Zambézia Province in Mozambique. It covers a total area of 5.3 million hectares of which 3.4 million hectares are forested, according to the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility.
The World Bank approved the programme in December 2018, after several years of development. Bank funding runs from February 2020 to the end of 2025. The project crediting period is from the start of 2018 to the end of 2024 during which time the programme anticipated generating 10.7 million carbon credits.
This was to be achieved (according to the Bank’s 396-page Revised Emission Reductions Program Document) by reducing deforestation in the programme area by 30% between 2018 and 2019, and by 40% between 2020 and 2024.
The FCPF’s Carbon Fund signed an emission reductions purchase agreement with the government of Mozambique to buy 10 million tonnes of emissions reductions from the programme in January 2019. The Carbon Fund would pay US$5 per tonne.
In May 2021, US consulting firm Aster Global Environmental Solutions completed the first verification (for the year 2018). In its validation report, Aster Global notes that it issued 50 Major Corrective Actions. These were all “successfully addressed” by the programme, according to Aster Global, and the programme was approved.
“Staggering inefficiency”
The Zambézia Integrated Landscape Management Programme (ZILMP) was linked to another World Bank funded US$45 million forest sector project under the Forest Investment Program. The project ran from 2017 to 2022 and about one-third of the Bank’s money was a loan.
The World Bank was in effect paying twice for the same emission reductions. The Forest Investment Program paid to implement the project and the FCPF paid for the results.
Counsell and Kill write that,
[A]s with other FCPF projects, the Mozambique case points to staggering inefficiency of the FCPF scheme. Taking into account prior FIP and ‘Readiness Fund’ investments, the claimed 1.28 million tonnes of emissions reductions have cost around US$60 million, or nearly US$47 each, even without accounting for the FCPF’s very high central administration and fund management costs.
The Forest Investment Program aimed to reduce deforestation, establish plantations, conserve forests, and promote agroforestry in the same districts as the ZILMP, plus Cabo Delgado. The results were limited: 3,000 hectares of plantations, 7,000 hectares of agroforestry, but only 27,000 hectares of forest conserved of the target of 850,000 hectares.
On 15 October 2021, the World Bank announced a payment of US$6.4 million to the government of Mozambique “for reducing 1.28 million tons of carbon emissions since 2019”. Mozambique was the first country to receive payments for emissions reductions under the FCPF.
That payment came 14 years after the FCPF was launched at COP13 in Bali. The “ultimate goal” of the FCPF was to “jump-start a forest carbon market” according to the World Bank’s Benoit Bosquet who led the development of FCPF.
The Bank’s management rates the overall implementation progress of the ZILMP as “moderately unsatisfactory”, which is the second lowest possible rating.
Failed to stop deforestation
The programme has failed to stop emissions from deforestation in the project area. In the years 2020, 2021, and 2022 emissions were higher than baseline emissions from deforestation. Over the period 2018 to 2022 emissions from deforestation increased by 3.3 million tonnes.
Counsell and Kill write that,
This major reversal seems to have completely wiped out the project ‘reversals buffer’ of credits accumulated to that point, though this is not entirely clear as the FCPF seems have been either unable or unwilling to calculate the state of the buffer for the 2019-2020 monitoring period. The FCPF’s purchases of purported emissions’ reductions from the Mozambique government halted after this period.
Global Forest Watch data shows that Zambézia Province lost 398,000 hectares of forest from 2018 to the end of 2023.
In March 2024 the World Bank carried out a Mid Term Review (MTR) mission of the ZILMP. The full report has not yet been made publicly available, but a June 2024 implementation status report states that,
The MTR recommendations include: reducing the scope of the project through a project’s restructuring; intensifying the implementation of the BSP; identifying lessons learned through the implementation to develop approaches for more effective and coordinated response to deforestation; and introduce activities enhancing inclusion of beneficiary marginalized communities and disadvantaged groups.
“In other words,” Counsell and Kill write, “the project was facing serious structural and implementation deficiencies.”
In September 2024, Mozambique’s Centro de Integridade Publica published a report about the ZILMP. The report found that “Benefits shared with communities, the private sector, district and provincial authorities, and the Gilé National Reserve amount to only about 3% of the originally estimated program benefits.”
This is the eighth in a collection of posts on REDD-Monitor under the headline “Crooked Carbon Business”. The posts are based on a series of briefings about carbon offset projects written by Simon Counsell and Jutta Kill.
https://thejunglechaosco.substack.com/p/eu-deforestation-regulation-and-how?r=6xmz51
This report seems to confirm my perception that most of the money devoted to offsetting "climate change" is a complete waste. Why are the world's citizens so trusting that various governments and world organizations are able to "save" them from the weather? All this program did was make certain individuals and organizations very wealthy.