Carbon sequestration in Africa: The land tenure problem

The prospect of using tropical forest projects to sequester significant amounts of atmospheric carbon as one mitigation approach to climate change has received considerable attention. In the Kyoto Protocol, the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) aspires to make such projects viable. This article examines the prospect of these projects in Africa, and argues that land tenure is much more than just a set of variables to be changed, and that instead it exists as a prohibitive obstacle to the implementation of afforestation and reforestation sequestration approaches. Five primary tenure problems are examined: (1) the disconnect between customary and statutory land rights, (2) legal pluralism, (3) tree planting as land claim, (4) expansion of treed areas in smallholder land use systems, and (5) the difficulty of using the ‘abandoned land’ category. The pervasiveness of these tenurial issues mean that the prospects for successfully implementing afforestation and reforestation projects in Africa are in reality quite weak. The current project approach to carbon storage in Africa needs to be significantly realigned with African reality in order for sequestration expectations to be practical.