“Ghost carbon.” How the Livelihoods’ Mangrove Restoration project in Senegal overestimated how many carbon credits the project generated
Ghost carbon “has no benefit to people or the environment”.
The Livelihoods’ Mangrove Restoration project aims to restore degraded mangroves on an area of more than 10,000 hectares in the Sine Saloum and Casamance deltas in Senegal. The project has so far sold almost 500,000 carbon credits.
Most of the companies that have bought carbon credits from this project have done so anonymously. One of the few that has acknowledged buying credits is an investment firm called Robeco Institutional Asset Management.
Amaury Sport Organisation bought 5,500 carbon credits to offset the emissions of the 2014 Paris Marathon. Carbon credits from the project also offset emissions from the 2014 Michelin Bibendum Challenge in China and the Paris 2024 Paralympic Games.
The project is run by the Paris-based Livelihoods Funds, which was created by food-products corporation Danone. 20 firms invest in the Livelihoods Funds, including Hermès, Michelin, La Poste, Schneider Electric, KfW, Crédit Agrocole, and Mars.
Colonial conservation
This project has appeared twice on REDD-Monitor. In 2024, journalist Jack Thompson wrote an article for Hakai Magazine following his research into the project and interviews with villagers who planted mangroves under the project. Thompson wrote 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.
Only 5.2% of the project budget went to communities. “It’s an injustice that echoes the colonial model of many 20th-century conservation projects in Africa,” Thompson wrote.
Green grabbing
Earlier this year, the project featured in one of the “Crooked Carbon Business” briefings written by Simon Counsell and Jutta Kill. In the briefing, they refer to the work of Marie Christine Cormier-Salem and Jacques Panfili, both of the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development.
In a 2016 paper, Cormier-Salem and Panfili wrote that,
[T]he extensive planting of a single mangrove species, Rhizophora mangle, is a means of green grabbing. The buying of carbon offsets by industrial conglomerates has disempowered local communities . . .
Counsell and Kill note that carbon credit ratings agency BeZero gave the project a “BBB” rating, meaning “a moderate likelihood of avoiding or removing 1 tonne of CO₂e”. BeZero highlighted the risk of non-permanence and “notable over-crediting risk due to potential over-estimation of soil carbon”.
Counsell and Kill also note that a 2017 verification reports for the project states that,
not all project areas are completely covered with trees as rd. 25% of the sample plots measured in the course of the 2nd verification period showed an almost 100% loss of tree cover. Subsequently the accuracy of the calculation of the emission reductions are negatively impacted.
The auditing firm TÜV SÜD South Asia recommended planting with another species of mangrove, Avicennia. The next verification report, carried out by TÜV NORD CERT in 2021 noted that no such replanting had taken place.
To make matters worse, in the third monitoring report the project proponent used a significantly higher value for carbon stored in the soils of the replanted areas. Counsell and Kill report that this resulted in nearly 40% more carbon credits than anticipated in the initial project document.
“Ghost carbon”
Julien Andrieu is a professor of geography at Côte d’Azur University. In 2020, he was lead author of a paper published in Forest Ecology and Management looking into natural regeneration of mangroves in the Saloum Delta based on remote sensing and botanical field data.
The authors found that 96% of mangrove regeneration is “spontaneous and linked to the rainfall recovery”. They conclude that,
[T]he mangrove ecosystem has shown resilience to rainfall and salinity variation, which advance our understanding of potential future climate change impacts to mangroves and their ability to recover from drought-induced mortality. We estimate that the diverse process of replantation contribution is diminutive to the spontaneous regeneration of mangroves in the Saloum Delta, and that the merit of replantation programs should be reevaluated. Narratives regarding the degradation of the Senegalese mangrove, the contributing pressures of human activity, and environmental politics should also be revised to reflect the findings of scholarly research.
Andrieu’s aim in his research is “to see if there were any lessons that could be learned to improve future restoration efforts”.
In a recent article in The Conversation, Andrieu writes that,
We recently discovered that more than a third of the restoration plots were a complete failure. There were no surviving mangroves at all in this area. On the rest of the land, the results ranged from less than 5% to a real success (100%).
The failure rate of the trees was not properly taken into consideration when calculating how much carbon dioxide they could capture. This meant the climate benefits were overstated.
Andrieu argues that the carbon project was “based on a poor understanding of ecology”. Part of the 10,000-hectare project area was not fit for mangroves. The project instructed villagers to plant mangrove seedlings in salty mudflats. These are not suitable for mangroves unless they are regularly flooded by the tides. The project planted areas covering up to 55 hectares that were too far away from tidal channels.
Some plots were up to 9 kilometres away from existing mangrove areas. The sites had different ecological conditions from natural mangrove habitats. “Replanting should have started closest to existing mangroves,” Andrieu writes.
As a result, 36% of the mangrove plots failed completely. The remaining 64% had at least some surviving mangroves, but survival within these plots was low. Overall, only 18.3% to 20.5% of the planted mangroves survived across the project area.
The consulting firm Agresta carried out the monitoring reports for the project. Agresta measured a sample of mangrove trees to calculate how much carbon the trees stored. They assumed that all the trees across the 10,000-hectare project area had survived and grown.
“Because so many trees died or never grew,” Andrieu writes, “the total amount of carbon stored in the trees was overestimated.”
Andrieu’s research team estimates that about 168,000 carbon credits were “ghost carbon” and “this has no benefit to people or the environment”.