Africa’s Turn: Casablanca's Bid to Reset Carbon Justice

By Gavin Serkin – In the humid depths of the Congo Basin, ancient trees absorb around 600 million tonnes of carbon dioxide each year—the only major tropical rainforest still acting as a significant net carbon sink—providing an invaluable service to the world. Yet on the balance sheets of the global market for carbon offsets, Africa’s vast carbon sinks–its rainforests, savannas, mangroves and peatlands–barely register. The entire continent today accounts for less than 2% of carbon credit trading in a $2 billion global market.

This profound disconnect between Africa’s climate contribution and its market value has triggered a growing movement for the continent to take ownership of its carbon wealth. Morocco is now taking up the mantle, mounting a campaign to transform Casablanca into the Africa’s gateway for climate finance.

Undervalued Carbon

Africa holds the planet’s largest untapped reserves of natural carbon sinks. The Congo rainforest alone stores more carbon per hectare than the Amazon. Yet the prevailing rules of carbon offsetting have long undervalued Africa’s conservation efforts. Current carbon credit methodologies hinge on additionality – proof that a carbon-cutting project wouldn’t have happened without carbon finance. In practice, this biases against countries that already protect their forests. As the Africa Finance Corporation (AFC) notes in its report, How Africa Can Unlock the World’s Most Promising Net-Zero Solution, the “prevailing concept of additionality under-values the historical and current significance of African forests”, effectively penalising nations that resisted deforestation. It’s a flawed logic that inadvertently accelerates deforestation in Africa by rewarding only new projects rather than ongoing stewardship.

This imbalance has left Africa marginalised in a market it should rightfully dominate. Rich nations and speculators have swooped in to broker Africa’s carbon credits, often on dubious terms – with local communities seeing little benefit. One of the most widely cited examples is the Kariba project in Zimbabwe, a large-scale forest conservation effort established under REDD+, the UN-backed framework for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation. The initiative was intended to generate tradable carbon credits by preserving forested land. Most of the project’s proceeds ended up with foreign developers rather than the villages responsible for protecting the trees, according to Bloomberg and other reports. More broadly, carbon offset projects globally have been found to deliver no clear benefits to indigenous people and even to cause greater environmental harm, with Africa accounting for a disproportionate share of these troubled projects.

Such outcomes underscore why African leaders insist on a new approach to ensure it is Africa’s people who profit from preserving the “green lungs” of the world. “Africa cannot afford to wait for the rest of the world to assign the value that our carbon sinks deserve,” the AFC wrote in the same report. Instead of accepting rock-bottom prices for credits that feed others’ net-zero pledges, Africa must harness its natural capital for its own development. The time has come to move beyond aid and fragmented project pipelines towards scalable, investor-ready ecosystems for climate finance. In plainer terms: turn Africa’s natural capital into real competitiveness on the world stage by creating a homegrown market that prices African carbon at its true value.

Across the continent, efforts are underway to establish new frameworks and platforms that reflect Africa’s role as a net carbon sink. The Africa Carbon Markets Initiative (ACMI), supported by the UN and the African Union, has set ambitious targets to expand the continent’s share of global carbon trading. The AFC and partners are mobilising pipelines of projects tied to local beneficiaries. And at a national level, countries from Kenya to Gabon are designing bespoke systems to certify, aggregate and trade their nature-based offsets.

The Casablanca Cluster

It is within this broader movement that Casablanca Finance City (CFC) is stepping forward to offer a financial hub for Africa’s carbon transition. At The Africa Debate in London in July – under the theme “Harnessing Natural Capital for Growth” – Saïd Ibrahimi, CEO of CFC, described the need to move beyond fragmented, donor-led models to a structured, pan-African framework. This includes platforms that attract private capital and support local project development, while maintaining high integrity and aligning with Article 6 of the Paris Agreement.

CFC’s initiative is backed by some concrete steps. In September 2024, CFC partnered with Morocco’s largest institutional investor, the Caisse de Dépôt et de Gestion (CDG), to establish a regional voluntary carbon market. The initiative seeks to position Morocco as a pioneer in Africa’s climate finance – a gateway connecting global capital with African green projects.

To catalyse the market, CFC launched a “Green Assets Cluster” in Casablanca this month, bringing together banks, insurers, and project developers to jump-start carbon credit ventures across the Maghreb and beyond. “Our ambition is to make CFC a reference platform for the carbon economy in Africa,” Ibrahimi said at The Africa Debate, “creating new growth segments in line with the climate agenda and African potential.”

By convening domestic and regional stakeholders, CFC hopes to give a common voice to African players in global climate forums and carbon pricing decisions. “Through collective initiatives of this kind, Africa will be able to make its voice heard, not only in carbon markets, but in global climate governance,” he added.

Crucially, the CFC-CDG plan's alignment with Article 6 means it could facilitate trades that count towards countries’ emissions targets. Yet, unlike purely compliance markets run by governments, this platform is being built as a voluntary market – flexible, entrepreneurial, and pan-African in scope.

CFC’s model stresses African ownership at every step: from project origination and verification to trading and reinvestment of proceeds. By leveraging Africa’s natural resources, the continent can become a leader in decarbonisation efforts while channelling funds into local sustainable development.

High Risk, High Integrity

Of course, it isn't not enough for Africa to generate more credits. The continent’s future in carbon markets hinges on quality and trust. Africa must use its resources to generate better credits – ones that buyers and regulators consider gold-standard offsets that genuinely reduce or remove carbon from the atmosphere.

For years, the voluntary carbon market has suffered a credibility crisis due to projects overstating climate benefits or failing to deliver promised community gains. As the AFC paper prescribes, every African project “must be high quality, high integrity” so that the continent’s offsets “command a value that is commensurate with this high quality.”

Achieving that means tackling the pitfalls that have plagued earlier projects. Verification is a key priority: no more relying solely on foreign registries and auditors to certify African projects. Ibrahimi and other African experts including AFC advocate training multiple on-the-ground African verifiers to build local capacity. Likewise, community benefit-sharing must be baked into project design. Too often, speculators have resold credits at several times the price they paid, siphoning benefits from the African villages on the front lines of climate change.

Then there’s additionality and permanence – ensuring projects aren’t greenwashes. Many REDD+ forest projects have faced scrutiny for selling credits that didn’t actually stop deforestation but simply moved it elsewhere. The African model going forward will need robust safeguards: long-term monitoring and contingency buffers to address events such as wildfires, prolonged droughts, or land degradation, all of which can reverse carbon gains by releasing stored emissions back into the atmosphere. Respect for indigenous land rights must be enshrined from the outset.

Winds of Change

Interest from international governments and corporations underpins the viability of Africa’s carbon offsets. At last year’s Africa Climate Summit in Nairobi, the UAE pledged to buy $450 million worth of African carbon credits by 2030. The UAE Carbon Alliance – a coalition of Abu Dhabi’s biggest financial and energy players – declared its ambition to position the Emirates as “a leading hub for high integrity, high quality carbon markets.” Climate Impact X (CIX), a joint venture of Singapore’s stock exchange and major banks, is creating a global carbon credit exchange, bundling credits from verified REDD+ projects to simplify carbon trading for big buyers.

At The Africa Debate in London, Ibrahimi hammered home the need to move from fragmentation to scale. Right now, many African carbon projects are small pilots. To put Africa on the carbon map, these efforts must be scaled into bankable investments. Finance centres like CFC can play a key role in channelling capital into green infrastructure and sustainable land use projects which create long-term jobs, protect biodiversity, and strengthen climate resilience – and create the frameworks to turn scattered projects into investor-ready portfolios.

One practical avenue is blended finance – mixing concessional public funding with private capital to de-risk projects. Green bonds are another tool: Morocco could issue bonds tied to carbon-cutting projects, utilising CFC’s financial know-how to structure these instruments and providing risk templates that can be replicated across projects.

Carbon Gateway

More than an economic opportunity, developing carbon markets is an existential imperative—one of the most immediate tools the world has to avert catastrophic global warming. By 2030, global demand for carbon credits could increase 15-fold, to over $50 billion a year. With the right supportive policies—simplifying approval processes, clarifying land tenure, and establishing national carbon registries—African countries are in a position to capture significant share of that flow.

Saïd Ibrahimi’s vision of CFC as a carbon gateway for Africa is audacious but plausible. The pieces are falling into place: strong political will in Morocco, continental initiatives like ACMI, demand from abroad, and a determination that past mistakes can’t be repeated. The Maghreb – historically a crossroads of trade – is well placed to bridge global capital with African carbon value.

* Gavin Serkin is The Financial Times 'must read' author of Frontier: Exploring the Top Ten Emerging Markets of Tomorrow, and a Journalist and Consultant on emerging & frontier markets, with particular focus on Africa and the Middle East