Liberian policymakers have almost completed a framework for selling carbon credits to international buyers. But local environmental groups say they’re being shut out of a fast-tracked final review of the policy.
According to Jeanine Cooper, chief executive officer of Liberia’s Carbon Market Authority, the “penultimate” draft of the policy was nearing completion last week. In a phone interview with Mongabay, she said she expected a final version to be ready for President Joseph Boakai to sign soon.
“We do need to move on with different policies and regulations, so it behooves us to get it done as quickly as possible,” she said.
A prior draft of the policy, dated April 2026 and reviewed by Mongabay, details how Liberia will set up a registry for approved carbon projects and how revenue will be allocated from them.
The draft establishes that the Carbon Market Authority, which was set up through an executive order by Boakai late last year, would be in charge of selling Liberian carbon credits.
Communities who own the forests and land tied to those credits would receive at most 50% of the revenue.
That’s rankled some civil society groups in the country.
“If I own something, I own it 100%,” said Dayugar Johnson of the NGO Coalition, a group of Liberian community rights and environmental advocates. “So why should 50% come to me?”
Cooper told Mongabay that Liberia’s carbon markets will respect community resource ownership, and that civil society groups have had ample opportunities to comment on it.
“A core part of this policy is free, prior and informed consent, so nobody is going to take anything from anybody without their consent,” she said.
Johnson said Liberian NGOs expected the policy to go through a final public validation process, but those plans were scrapped in favor of a narrower technical review by government agencies. In an April 30 letter to Boakai, the NGO Coalition urged him not to sign the document without fully engaging stakeholders.
“We’ve been giving inputs, but sometimes the next version comes back with the same text, and we thought the place to clarify all of that was the national validation, which now they are cutting out of the process,” Johnson said.
Earlier this month, the Financial Times reported that the African Development Bank (AfDB) was withholding a funding package for Liberia until the country finalized its carbon policy.
Cooper said the report was “not true.”
However, Johnson shared with Mongabay what he said was a leaked email from the head of Liberia’s Environmental Protection Agency to government officials, which described the carbon policy as “linked to AfDB support for Liberia’s 2026 budget.”
“If the policy goes out as it is, it creates an opportunity for a law that will have a lot of loopholes. Communities could be marginalized, and that’s why we’re pushing back on it,” Johnson said.
Banner image: Forests in Liberia’s Sapo National Park. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.
This story first appeared on Mongabay
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