African environmental and agricultural civil society organizations have neither meaningfully engaged with the rapidly evolving terrestrial carbon markets and associated financial mechanisms nor become effective leaders in the origination of carbon finance initiatives in their respective countries.  As a result, the carbon finance space in Africa is increasingly becoming the domain of governments and private sector companies, with agendas that are unlikely to be sufficiently responsive to community, biodiversity, and small‐scale agriculture and gender issues.  As such, there is a clear need to support civil society and community groups to participate significantly in the formulation and implementation of terrestrial carbon finance initiatives to help ensure that these achieve their full potential.  In order to achieve this level of participation a concerted effort is required in the short- to medium-term to build capacity that is specifically tailored to the needs and attributes of a range of NGO and community-based organizations across the continent.

The proposed Africa Terrestrial Carbon Centre of which Face the Future is an associate organization, meets this challenge and is designed to respond to the rapidly growing demand from local Civil Society Organizations (CSO) and community organizations for awareness, education and assistance to develop community-based terrestrial carbon projects.  The opportunity to have a major catalytic impact will be achieved by careful selection of CSO and NGO organizations for initial educational support and then targeting only those organizations and sites with the greatest potential to achieve tangible results in developing credible projects that deliver multiple benefits and accessing finance.

The goal is to build the capacity in Africa to ensure early success stories in the development of terrestrial carbon finance projects that deliver climate, community and biodiversity benefits on the continent through the establishment of the ATCC.

More information and updates about this project and our involvement will follow.