Land Grabbing and Global Climate Action
Voluntary carbon markets are currently the main avenue to channel international investments in land-based carbon sequestration. These markets pose major challenges for Indigenous Peoples and local communities.
Carbon markets have revived a rush for land to mitigate climate change, leading to a new wave of land grabs that threaten people’s rights, especially under customary land tenure systems. As governments target 1 billion hectares for land-based carbon removal by 2060, carbon offsetting must not justify these trade-offs.
In the late 2000s, a global land rush prompted by soaring food prices led to international investors acquiring about 30 million hectares (ha) of land in low- and middle-income countries for agribusiness and other enterprises. This rapid shift in land ownership severely impinged on the land rights of local populations and led to the displacement of local communities and smallholder farmers.
Recently, pressures linked to global climate action threaten a new era of land grabs that may result in similarly devastating consequences. These include large-scale climate mitigation measures that shape land use through the protection and restoration of forests and ecosystems, as well as reforestation and afforestation projects that establish tree plantations or new secondary forests.
In order to meet their climate mitigation pledges, governments worldwide need to allocate approximately 1 billion ha of land for restoration, reforestation and afforestation by 2060. Additionally, the voluntary carbon market, where different actors can obtain carbon credits to offset their emissions, has significantly increased the demand for land. Verra’s Voluntary Carbon Standard, one of the largest carbon crediting mechanisms, has registered land-based carbon offset projects covering nearly 24 million ha, with over 90 percent registered since just 2017. About 80 percent of these projects focus on forest protection, reforestation and afforestation, with 36 percent located in Africa, where land rights are often undocumented.
Figure 1
Déjà vu? The land rush returns
Nearly 24 million ha are committed to carbon offset projects, rivaling the scale of the heavily criticized global land rush of the 2000s.
While increasing investments in climate mitigation are crucial in addressing the global climate crisis, their scale and the involvement of new actors such as private companies in regions where customary land tenure systems and other types of undocumented land rights still prevail is concerning. This is particularly true when considering the sobering track record of large-scale agricultural investments in these regions. The current scale of land-based carbon offset projects registered with Verra is already comparable in size to the large-scale land acquisitions for agriculture by international investors in Africa over the past two decades. While many projects in the voluntary market are involved in partnerships with local communities that maintain previous ownership rights and involve benefit sharing, others occur on state-owned lands and do not recognise customary land rights or involve large-scale purchases and concessions by private companies. Human rights violations and land conflicts have already been reported for many of the latter projects, including those recognised through international standards.
Projects relying on large-scale land acquisitions and involving the protection or restoration of forests thus merit deeper scrutiny, especially when they take place in areas where land rights are insecure. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example, 5 percent of the country’s total land area is used for logging concessions, some of which have already been repurposed into forest conservation concessions for carbon offsetting. Companies like Portuguese-owned Nordsudtimber first profit off logging concessions, then seek to profit further by converting the logging sites into carbon credit initiatives. The conversion of large logging concessions into carbon offset projects involves critical weaknesses. First, the logging concessions that were converted often involved severe violations of the land rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities. Second, although the local population has been protecting these forests for centuries, few benefits are shared, and their participation and engagement remain limited.
Reforestation and afforestation represent another major form of land-based climate change mitigation that can create conflicts over land. Forest Neutral Congo in partnership with TotalEnergies planned to demarcate 40,000 ha for an acacia tree-planting project in the Republic of the Congo, sparking land conflicts due to encroachment on community lands without adequate consultation or compensation, leading to tensions over land rights and resource access.
Figure 2
People's land rights at risk
The largest investments in land-based carbon projects occur in areas where land rights are insecure, putting local communities at risk.
These cases demonstrate that land is not just a resource for production or climate mitigation but a vital part of the livelihoods and identities of communities across the globe. Local populations have been protecting these forests for centuries. Land tenure systems have often gone unacknowledged by international actors, and violations of the free, prior, and informed consent standard that protects Indigenous Peoples' rights are all too common.
Until now, no clear processes have been established for how the new carbon offset projects should redress prior injustices. However, it is clear that partnership with communities, as well as community-driven measures are key in the execution of climate projects to ensure that trade-offs are not made between protecting the climate and people’s rights to land and secure livelihoods.