Episode 18: Community-Centric Blue Carbon Projects in West Africa with Elizabeth Littlefield, Senior Partner @ West Africa Blue
Elizabeth Littlefield, Senior Partner @ West Africa Blue
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
And for natural capital aficionados who prefer the written word to the podcast format, we have transcribed (with minor edits for ease of reading) Episode 18 on the Solving Climate, Naturally Substack account here.
Episode recorded on: March 8, 2024