An airline, an oil major, or a technology company can, for a few dollars a tonne, purchase a certificate stating that a hectare of Congo Basin or East African forest will remain standing, and count that certificate against its own continuing emissions. The forest is real. The conservation, in many cases, is real. What is not adequately priced is the value of what is actually being sold, because African carbon credits have for years traded at a fraction of the price comparable credits fetch when the underlying project sits in a wealthier country with stronger verification infrastructure and more sophisticated sellers at the negotiating table. I do not think that gap is a natural function of supply and demand. I think it is a function of who gets to set the price, and Africa has, for most of the voluntary carbon market’s existence, not been that party.
A Market Priced by the Buyers
The voluntary carbon market, unlike the compliance markets that operate under binding regulatory caps, has no central pricing authority. Prices are negotiated project by project, often between a Western intermediary, a broker, a verification firm, a corporate buyer, and a project developer on the ground, frequently an international conservation NGO or a joint venture rather than the local government or community holding the underlying land rights. The methodology for how much carbon a given forest actually sequesters, and therefore how many credits it can generate, is set by verification standards bodies headquartered in Washington and Geneva, audited by firms with no obligation to the communities whose land is being valued. Every layer of the pricing mechanism sits outside the country supplying the actual asset.
Every layer of the pricing mechanism sits outside the country supplying the actual asset.
The Verification Scandal Was the System Working as Designed
The credibility of large portions of this market took a direct hit in 2023, when independent research found that the majority of rainforest carbon credits issued by one of the world’s largest certifiers, covering major African and Latin American projects, represented far less genuine emissions reduction than claimed, in some analyses next to none. The scandal was reported, correctly, as a verification failure. I would go further: it was a demonstration of what happens when the entity setting the price, verifying the claim, and profiting from the sale are all on the same side of a transaction the seller’s own government had little role in structuring. A market this loosely audited was never going to price its underlying asset accurately, and the direction of the mispricing was never going to favour the party with the least leverage in the room.
What Higher-Integrity Markets Charge, and Why
Carbon removal credits tied to newer, technologically verified methods, direct air capture chief among them, trade at prices many multiples higher than typical African forest-conservation credits, and the market justifies that gap partly on genuine grounds, permanence and measurement precision differ meaningfully between a machine that captures carbon with instrumented certainty and a forest whose continued standing depends on decades of enforcement against logging and land conversion pressure the seller does not fully control. But permanence risk does not explain a price gap running into multiples for credits that, properly verified, represent real and additional carbon sequestration. Some of that gap is technology. A meaningful share of it is that African sellers have historically lacked the verification infrastructure, the legal capacity, and the market information to negotiate as equals, and buyers have had no commercial incentive to correct an imbalance working in their favour.
The corrective is not to abandon carbon markets, which remain one of the few mechanisms currently channelling international capital toward African conservation and reforestation at meaningful scale. It is for African governments and communities to stop accepting broker-set prices as a market reality outside their control and start building the verification capacity, the direct government-to-buyer negotiating structures, and the regional coordination among major forest-holding states, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Gabon, Republic of the Congo chief among them, that would let sellers set a floor price collectively rather than negotiate individually against buyers who already coordinate as an industry. Gabon’s push for direct, government-negotiated carbon deals rather than broker-intermediated ones is an early example of what that correction looks like in practice. The forest is not underpriced because it is worth less. It is underpriced because, until recently, almost no one on the selling side of the table was positioned to argue otherwise.
That is a correctable condition, not a permanent one, and the correction does not require rejecting the buyers or the market itself. It requires African states treating carbon as the strategic export it has become, with the same seriousness applied to a mineral concession or an oil block, rather than as a conservation grant administered by whichever intermediary showed up first with a standard contract. The price a market sets is a statement about who it believes has somewhere else to go. Africa’s forests do not have anywhere else to go. The states that hold them are only beginning to negotiate as if they knew that was the buyers’ problem, not theirs.
