Case Study

The project that did everything right and still failed

Northern Mozambique REDD+ Project, Cabo Delgado Province, Mozambique

A REDD+ programme spanning 2.4 million hectares across northern Mozambique, with rigorous carbon baselines, genuine community engagement, and nearly $150 million in committed investment. We led the technical development. The project was stopped by a single act of political corruption. The lesson we took from it shaped the practice: governance readiness above the project level matters as much as everything inside it.

REDD+ is an international mechanism through which governments and project developers generate carbon credits by protecting forests and demonstrating that deforestation rates are declining. The credits are sold to companies or countries seeking to offset their carbon emissions.

We helped develop one of the largest REDD+ projects ever proposed in Africa: 2.4 million contiguous hectares across seven districts in Cabo Delgado Province, northern Mozambique. Carbon Planet had committed toward $150 million in investment. The project had government support at the technical level and was moving through dual VCS and CCBA certification baselines.

The technical work was real

A 20-year satellite time-series of land cover change established the historical deforestation rate. LiDAR scanning built a carbon baseline across the project area. Drivers of deforestation were mapped spatially. Socioeconomic baselines were established across all seven districts, including how men and women contributed to and depended on forest resources. Land tenure was reviewed across the full area under Mozambique's complex and often contradictory legal framework.

The baseline data was rigorous. The carbon accounting was defensible. The community engagement was genuine.

The project reached the stage where ministerial approval was required. That approval was withheld as a condition of corruption at the political level. The project was terminated.

Cabo Delgado subsequently became the site of a significant armed insurgency beginning in 2017, displacing more than a million people and making conservation work in the region impossible under any institutional arrangement.

The failure wasn't technical. It was architectural.

A project developer who invests years of work and millions of dollars in technical development without first establishing whether the institutional environment can sustain the project to completion is building on an unstable foundation. The carbon baselines don't matter if a single political decision point can collapse the entire enterprise.

This is the origin of a principle that now runs through every engagement we take on: governance readiness must be assessed and established before significant technical or financial investment is committed. Not just within the project. Above it.