What happened to Blue Carbon?
Liberia: In September 2023, the news stopped us cold: Blue Carbon, a company from the oil emirate of Dubai, was poised to take control of one million hectares of rainforest in Liberia for carbon credits that supposedly protect the climate – on paper. Indulgence trading at the expense of local people. Then the company vanished.
The scale of the threat was staggering: a memorandum of understanding with the Liberian government would have handed around one million hectares of land – about ten percent of the country’s total area – to Blue Carbon for 30 years. In exchange for protecting the rainforests, the company would have received so-called carbon credits to sell to customers, allowing them, on paper, to offset climate-damaging emissions.
The whole scheme would have come at the expense of local people who live in and from the forest, yet were kept completely in the dark about the plans.
One detail stands out: the self-proclaimed climate protector Blue Carbon – at the time owned by Sheikh Ahmed Dalmook Al Maktoum of Dubai’s royal family – surfaced in 2023, just a few months before the COP28 climate conference. The host city was the oil emirate of Dubai. So was it all just fanfare, smoke and mirrors, greenwashing? That certainly seems likely.
And now Blue Carbon has apparently vanished into thin air.
AFP finds no trace of Blue Carbon
In November 2025, the news agency AFP devoted an article to Blue Carbon’s disappearance under the title “The case of Africa’s ‘vanishing’ carbon deals”. According to the report, the company apparently has no registration anywhere in the world and no “operational footprint” in the carbon credit market. Its website and its Instagram and X accounts – all shut down. AFP said there was no response to emails or phone calls, and even a visit to the company’s office in Dubai failed – because apparently there is no office there anymore.
Asked by AFP about the status of the Blue Carbon deal, Elijah Whapoe, chair of Liberia’s National Climate Change Steering Committee, said: “It was stopped. As we speak, there is no attempt to my knowledge, anything, about trying to resuscitate it.”
In Monrovia, environmental advocates from our partner organization Sustainable Development Institute (SDI) have also neither heard nor seen anything of Blue Carbon.
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We are ending our petition
In an unexpected turn, the demand of our petition “Do not sell out Liberias forests for Dubai’s climate excesses” appears to have been met. At this point, there seem to be no Blue Carbon projects moving forward in Liberia.
We are therefore ending the petition and thank all 73,109 people who signed it.
We do not fully trust this development, so we will be keeping a close watch in case the company reappears.