Plagued by illegal logging and corruption, Liberia has been losing its forests at an alarming rate. But its new strategy to make direct payments to communities that agree to prohibit cutting and protect their trees is seen as a potential model for other developing nations.
By Fred Pearce
Illegal logging and deforestation are on the rise in Liberia, home to almost half of West Africa’s surviving tropical forests. Corruption is rife, and cocoa farmers from neighboring Ivory Coast are invading protected forests, while schemes to reward conservation by selling carbon credits from intact forests have repeatedly failed to get off the ground.
But there is new hope. Two-thirds of the country’s forests are owned by rural communities, and a disarmingly simple scheme now being launched by the country’s leading environmentalist will pay those communities up front in cash, if they agree to banish loggers and protect their trees.
The novel plan “breaks a logjam that has prevented conservation and land reform initiatives from taking hold in Liberia for decades,” says David Rothe, a development consultant and former policy advisor to the British government. “It is the most hopeful plan I have seen,” says Saskia Ozinga of the European forests NGO Fern.
If it works, both long-time observers of tropical-forest policymaking say that it could have important lessons for other countries that are losing their forests. It could even become a model for a new approach to helping protect some of the world’s most critical stores of carbon in tropical forests, which will be the focus of international climate negotiations later this year.
After being founded as a state for freed American slaves in 1822, Liberia escaped European colonial rule. Today the thinly populated country’s forests are the heart of West Africa’s last remaining biodiversity hotspot — home to endangered chimpanzees, Diana monkeys, and most of the 2,500 pygmy hippos surviving in the wild.
In theory, Liberia could have a thriving bio-economy based around sustainable harvesting of its forests, ecotourism, and international funding for forest conservation. But 20 years after a ruinous civil war, and despite plenty of foreign aid for rebuilding, the country’s forests are today in a poor state, the logging industry is ill-managed and often corrupt, and its people are among the world’s poorest, ranking 177 among 193 countries in the UN Human Development Index.
Liberia’s state institutions, including its Forestry Development Authority (FDA), have a “veneer of good governance that successfully conceals… widespread corruption,” a review conducted for the European Union concluded in 2022. “The very elements of state capacity that international donors have spent millions on supporting… are wielded in service of fraudulent ends,” found Gregory Coleman, a former and current inspector general of the Liberia National Police, and Benjamin Spatz, a former special advisor to its government now at the University of Cape Town. The “manipulation of formal processes,” the review noted, amounted to “economic gaslighting.”
A timber truck in Zorzor, Liberia. Tommy Trenchard / Alamy
An EU scheme to decriminalize the timber trade by using barcodes to track logs from the forests to export markets was extensively subverted under a former managing director of the FDA. Up to 70 percent of the country’s log exports were made “off the books,” according to a dossier compiled by the British government.
The gap between theory and practice in the protection of Liberia’s forests has long been huge. Since the end of the civil war in 2003, successive governments have pioneered enshrining in law the traditional rights of rural communities to their forest lands. Some 68 percent of the forests are now under community control.
But the system has repeatedly been “hijacked by rapacious logging companies,” says David Young, a consultant on forest governance and formerly of the NGO Global Witness. Complicit government officials have repeatedly duped local leaders into signing agreements on behalf of their communities that hand over logging rights to their forests. Most commercial timber production today comes from community forests, but the promised jobs and royalties rarely materialize.
A new threat to Liberia’s forests is being posed by poor cocoa farmers from neighboring Ivory Coast, the world’s largest cocoa producer.
Media reports estimate that as many as 25,000 Ivorian cocoa farmers, many of them expelled from protected forests in their own country, have crossed the 450-mile border between the two countries since 2018, leasing forest land from poor Liberian forest communities. More migrant farmers are reportedly arriving from nearby Burkina Faso.
“The availability of cheap fertile land in Liberia is a magnet for smallholders throughout West Africa,” a study of the invasions by Initiatives for Community Development and Forest Conservation (IDEF), an Ivorian NGO, reported last year. Harvested cocoa beans are sent back across the border to enter global supply chains, including those certified as deforestation-free, IDEF claimed.
The Liberian government has been slow to counter the threat, fearing antagonizing its own communities in remote border areas. Earlier this year, locals living in an area near the border, where forests are being cleared for cocoa farming, kidnapped a wildlife ranger in the Grebo-Krahn National Park, after he allegedly violated a local order prohibiting rangers from forest areas deemed to be under the control of traditional leaders.
Conservationists hope that paying such communities to protect their forests will give them enough money to replace the profits from leasing their land for cocoa farming. But the stakes are high. The cocoa trade “risks fueling a repeat of the widespread cocoa-driven clearances that have all but wiped out” forest cover in the Ivory Coast, IDEF’s director Bakary Traore told Reuters.
Liberia’s forests badly need a politically and economically viable route to survival, conservationists warn. To date the most pursued option has been to capitalize on their accumulation of carbon by selling carbon credits into U.N.-sponsored international trading systems known collectively as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD).
Forest near Bopolu, Liberia. John Wessels / AFP via Getty Images
But carbon markets require extensive monitoring, reporting, and verification to demonstrate long-term carbon gains in forests that can be sold as emissions offsets. The bills for these and other overheads mean that “there is little money left for the locals,” says Arthur Blundell of Natural Capital Advisors, a North American consultancy service for business, who has advised the U.K. and USAID on Liberia’s timber trade.
Liberia’s efforts to sell carbon credits have been ambitious, but so far unfulfilled.
A British entrepreneur with no history of forest activities in 2010 persuaded government officials to sign up to giving him the rights to sell carbon credits accrued from vast areas of the country’s forests.
A later report on the affair commissioned by Liberia’s anti-corruption body concluded that the terms of the deal, which was eventually revoked by the president, could have bankrupted the Liberian government.
Then in 2023, the Liberian government signed a confidential memorandum of understanding with Blue Carbon, a company set up by a Dubai sheikh, again ceding exclusive rights to sell carbon credits from more than a tenth of the country’s forests. International donors raised concerns that the proposed deal contravened the country’s constitution and the land rights of forest communities, and the project has so far not gone ahead.
The failure to generate income for forest communities from the conservation of their forests is a tragedy for the country’s rural development, says Silas Siakor, one of the country’s most prominent environmental activists.
A winner of the Goldman Prize in 2006 for uncovering how illegal timber trade had funded the country’s civil war, he founded the influential Sustainable Development Institute and now runs another forest-oriented Liberian NGO Integrated Development and Learning (IDL). “We’ve been readying for REDD for about 20 years, but it has not delivered… A different approach is required to unlock the vast economic opportunities [these] forests present.”
Siakor’s plan, being piloted this summer, is called Payment for Stewardship. It bypasses the need for the complex audit required for carbon trading and instead delivers direct up-front cash payments to communities that agree to protect their forests from farming, forestry, or mining.
He proposes paying an initial 60 cents per acre per year. That may not sound a lot, but it is competitive with what communities receive for allowing their forest to be logged. Typical large commercial contracts currently award 30 cents per acre, he says.
The agreements to be signed by communities will also establish community funds that ensure the money is shared within the community, either to individual families or for community services such as schools, clinics, or roads.
Silas Siakor. Courtesy of Silas Siakor
“Because land rights are communal, it is important that the whole community benefits from the payments, not just those directly using the forest,” Siakor says. The approach should “tip the financial scales” against extractive economic activity in the forests and toward their protection, he says.
Young, who has advised on the project, says Payment for Stewardship “is conditional on keeping the forest standing, but otherwise there are few strings attached… It emphasizes strengthening communities to manage their forests and the income they get from doing so.
There is no wasting money on carbon accounting or international consultants. And critically it is easy to understand — by everyone.”
It is also happening now. A pilot phase should begin payments this month, says Siakor. Funded for the first two years with $300,000 from Irish Aid, it covers 28 villages in 125,000 acres of dense high-conservation-value forest in Sinoe County in the southeast of the country, close to the Sapo National Park, home to the world’s largest population of pygmy hippos.
Another partner is the U.S.-based NGO GiveDirectly, which specializes in facilitating unconditional cash transfers to communities living in extreme poverty.
The project was launched earlier this month by Siakor’s IDL and Liberia’s FDA, under its new managing director Rudolph Merab. Merab’s officials are currently finalizing maps of community forests and helping train community forest patrols, says Siakor.
“Community forests have been the vehicle for some of the most serious forestry scandals,” concedes Rothe. “So, it has risks, hence the emphasis on strengthening management and accountability at community level.”
With further international funding in the pipeline, Siakor expects to quadruple the project’s reach to 500,000 acres by 2027 and hopes another 2.5 million acres may become available to communities as existing logging licences in community-owned forests lapse or are canceled.
“There is potential to bring this to scale quickly, if we can secure the finance to get it off the ground,” he says.
The innovative approach is being looked at with increasing interest by governments and by private and philanthropic organizations that have become jaded by the poor track record of many carbon-offset projects.
“Non-market” approaches to protecting forests were formally operationalized last year under the 2015 Paris climate agreement. And a version of paying for forest conservation without detailed carbon accounting forms a central plank of proposals that Brazil hopes will be agreed at the next climate conference in the Amazon city of Belém later this year.
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva wants the international community to create a Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF), a permanent $125 billion endowment fund that would pay tropical forest countries $1.60 per acre per year for their protection, with a fifth of the funds potentially allocated to Indigenous people and local communities.
“Brazil’s TFFF could be like Payment for Stewardship at a global level,” says Young.
Big questions remain about the plan, including whether all forests or only dense forests should qualify, what the penalties for continued deforestation might be, how much money will in practice reach forest communities, and whether it could end up criminalizing traditional forest livelihoods.
But while the TFFF is embroiled in inter-government negotiations in the coming months, Siakor’s payments should be reaching the bank accounts of Liberian forest communities any day now.
This article is the fifth in a series on global efforts to promote green economies that protect biodiversity and the rights of traditional rural communities.
Fred Pearce is a freelance author and journalist based in the U.K. He is a contributing writer for Yale Environment 360 and is the author of numerous books, including The Land Grabbers, Earth Then and Now: Amazing Images of Our Changing World, and The Climate Files: The Battle for the Truth About Global Warming.
