Episode 18: Community-Centric Blue Carbon Projects in West Africa with Elizabeth Littlefield, Senior Partner @ West Africa Blue

Solving Climate, Naturally

In this episode, we speak with Elizabeth Littlefield, Senior Partner at West Africa Blue, a community-centric blue carbon project developer operating in Sierra Leone and Guinea. Elizabeth brings unique perspective to the conversation from her time as the President and CEO of OPIC, now renamed the US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC), where she served from 2010 until 2017, as well as from her decade as CEO of the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP), a policy and research center housed at the World Bank dedicated to advancing poor people’s access to financial services, and her 16 years at JP Morgan including as Managing Director in charge of capital markets and financing in emerging Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA). Elizabeth also spent 1988-1990 living in West Africa setting up microfinance institutions with local communities.

In this episode, we cover a wide range of topics including:

- West Africa Blue’s projects in Sierra Leone and Guinea, and why carbon is necessary to the success of these projects

- What the voluntary carbon market can learn from microfinance

- Importance of transparent benefit-sharing agreements, and what carbon project developers tend to get wrong

- Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC) and how it is done in practice

- The case for developing carbon projects with local communities and indigenous peoples

- Lessons from the EU and the concept of a buyer of last resort to stabilize carbon markets

- Role of Development Finance Institutions (DFIs) in carbon markets, and understanding the diversity and limitations of DFIs’ mandates - adding nuance to the exhortation to “take more risk”

- Need for rapidly-disbursing, pragmatic early stage capital for nature-based carbon projects

Want to learn more? Check out these resources:

West Africa Blue & its Living Labs of open-source information

The Nature of Nature: Why We Need the Wild, by Enric Sala

Episode recorded on: March 8, 2024