Gabon signed carbon credit agreements worth 6 million tons of carbon dioxide with the German public company SEFE, the Gabonese Presidency announced. The country, with 88% of its area covered by forests, becomes the first in Africa to market carbon jurisdictional credits.
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04/11/2026
by
Lusa
O Gabon signed carbon credit agreements worth about 6 million tonnes of carbon dioxide with the German public company SEFE, the Gabonese Presidency announced today.
This Central African country, whose territory is covered by forests in 88%, according to official data, is part of the Congo basin, considered the second largest tropical forest area in the world, after the Amazon, and one of the planet's main lungs.
In a statement published on Facebook, the spokesman of the Gabonese Presidency, Théophane Nzame-Nze Biyoghe, announced the signing of the “first agreements on the marketing of judicial carbon credits with SEFE”, the English acronym of the company Securing Energy for Europe, an international energy company owned by the German Government.
The financial conditions of these contracts, signed in London by the Gabonese Agency for the Development of the Green Economy (AGADEV), have not been announced.
The AGADEV note states that “based on their status as HFLD (High Forest, Low Deforestation) countries, these jurisdictional carbon credits remunerate efforts to preserve the Gabonese forest, carried out long ago by the country; Gabon thus becomes the first African country to market carbon-judicial credits, resulting from the preservation of the forest and eligible for Corsia, one of the most stringent standards in the world.”.
Nzame-Nze Biyoghe explained that the agreement now reached “does not mean that Libreville is selling its land and forests, because ownership and management of the national forest heritage remain the responsibility of the State”.
A country rich in oil, but heavily indebted and underdeveloped, Gabon is considered by the World Bank as a “pioneer in ecology” and “champion of carbon neutrality initiatives”.
Carbon credits, created by the Kyoto Protocol, act as a kind of environmental currency, where each unit emitted is equivalent to the reduction or removal of one tonne of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere.
In recent years, several African countries, including Mozambique and Kenya, have adopted this model, which allows more polluting companies to compensate for this production by paying other countries for reducing the emission of polluting gases, through certified sustainable projects such as reforestation and regenerative agriculture until the transition to clean energy.
The money from this transaction directly finances initiatives that prevent or capture greenhouse gases, transforming the negative environmental impact into an economic engine for decarbonisation worldwide.