Who Controls REDD+ in West Africa?: the Uneven Geographies of Forest Carbon Offsetting in the West African Region

Geographers continue to analyze the politics of forest carbon offset projects, often emphasizing local-global and global North-Global South spatialities. Regional spatiality of the forest carbon economy remains largely unexplored, despite the analytical opportunities it offers. Drawing on analysis of data from ten (10) carbon offset registries, we map the uneven regional geographies of forest carbon offset projects (or REDD+ type projects) in West Africa. We found that private actors dominate West African carbon forestry projects, and more than half of the project proponents are based or headquartered outside Africa. The majority of carbon offset buyers are based in Europe, where companies in the Engineering, Manufacturing, and Construction sectors top the list. In addition to the much-analyzed Global North-South and local-global spatialities underpinning forest carbon offset projects, our study highlights the regional histories, politics, and socioecologies that also shape the dynamics of these projects in West Africa. We demonstrate that carbon forestry initiatives should be understood as space-making relations and processes that are reconstituting the West African region through the uneven distribution of influence over carbon, forests and land. Spatially explicit regional analyses of REDD+ are crucial for deepening our understanding of forest carbon politics as actors pursue net-zero agendas globally.