“I salute Man Group for leading the way in supporting both the future of the planet and the alleviation of poverty, in an innovative and sustainable way.”
Robin Birley
CEO, Envirotrade Ltd.
I am delighted to welcome Man Group’s purchase of voluntary carbon credits directly from the Nhambita community in Mozambique: a real demonstration of courage and thought leadership by one of the corporate leaders in the global warming battle.
Community forestry has a chequered reputation: without support by leaders like Man Group, great swathes of the third world, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, will be excluded from the Global Warming struggle. Forest burning by subsistence farmers, currently accounting for nearly a fifth of global emissions, will continue unabated, and an innovative means of alleviating poverty will fall into abeyance.
The key to the Nhambita project’s success is income tied directly to efforts in tree planting, forest fire management and land use change. Payment is made following certification by the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Management, and the transactional nature of the deal helps achieve dignity as well as environmental benefit, since the income has been earned rather than just received. Such initiatives can generate real benefits, to equal, say, those of a chimney scrubber installed in a Detroit factory.
There is now a very real carbon economy in Nhambita; local people’s understanding of carbon sequestration very likely exceeds that of most people in the City of London. The project has also enabled better relationships with other NGOs. German aid agency GTZ recently completed building a local school, with 30% of the cost met by the community carbon fund, giving the people of Nhambita a real sense of ownership as well as a new school.
The battle against global warming is truly a universal struggle – tens of millions of impoverished people making a major contribution surely highlights the meagre contributions of many in the West.
