Carbon market opportunities for the forestry sector of Africa

From Executive Summary

"Globally, more attention is being focused on climate change and how it will affect our world. In particular, climate change mitigation activities are creating a large market with many developers and investors. At this time, African countries have not benefited greatly from this emerging market and new commodity. Fortunately, current land management and land cover in Africa provides many countries with large opportunities to enter into this market while at the same time furthering development goals. In order to capture the opportunities building in this arena, it is imperative that governments understand how the market works, what needs to take place for these opportunities to be seized upon, and what support the government and other agencies can give to assist in the development of this sector.

In 2007, for the first time, the global scientific community agreed that the warming of the climate is ‘unequivocal’ and that this observed increase is linked to anthropogenic GHG emissions. The
impacts on Africa are predicted to have serious consequences. For example, across the African
continent temperatures are predicted to rise. Precipitation is expected to decrease in northern
and southern Africa."