1 Introduction
A thirty-minute drive from Libreville, the road is bordered by a dense forest on both sides. The taxi stops next to a few parked cars and a wooden cabin where a young woman greets me. She is an eco-guide wearing the camouflage uniform of the Gabonese state agency in charge of the national parks. As I agree to a guided tour, we first pause in front of a board, the colours of which are fading in the humid climate. An image of André Raponda-Walker (1871–1968) welcomes us to the “wood of giants.”1 “He was the first Gabonese botanist, and also a clergyman, the son of an English merchant and a Mpongwe princess,”2 explains the guide, giving me a glimpse of the country’s complicated history. As we enter the forest, she points at a tall tree on our right: “a centennial Okoume tree is saluting us.” A subendemic species to the Gabonese rainforest, Aucoumea klaineana constitutes 80 percent of the trees in the Arboretum Raponda-Walker. The trade of Okoume timber to supply Europe with plywood was a major source of revenues in the booming decades of the logging industry, from the 1940s and the end of the French colonial empire, to the 1970s and the rise of oil as a highly profitable resource in the postcolonial nation (Pourtier 1989, 147). The coastal forests of the Arboretum were logged in the late nineteenth century before being granted protected status in the 1950s (Walters et al. 2015). Along sandy footpaths criss-crossed by a web of surface roots, the largest, most spectacular trees are accompanied by a wooden sign displaying their vernacular and scientific names—and the logo of a sponsor, the French oil company Total. Except for the presence of taxonomy, the place bears little resemblance to European imperial gardens and their curated specimens. The Arboretum on the shores of
A Sunday morning in the Arboretum Raponda Walker near Libreville, Gabon
PHOTOGRAPH: BY THE AUTHOR
Why open the chapter in this forest? A clue is nailed to the bark of a tree. A metal tag indicates that, besides welcoming urban dwellers for walks in nature, the forest is also an object of study. One reason why tropical forests, like this one, have come to be of great interest to scientists and policy-makers alike, is the quantity of carbon contained in the woody tissues of the trees, and that is the topic of this chapter.
2
The climate crisis has put forests in the spotlight. Plants use sunlight and water to convert carbon dioxide into sugars through photosynthesis, allowing them to live, grow, and build woody structures.4 Large datasets and global models indicate that forestlands sequester a considerable proportion of the carbon dioxide that is released into the atmosphere by the combustion of fossil fuels (Pan et al. 2021; Walker et al. 2021). Although the greenhouse gas is emitted unevenly across the planet, it circulates, and some of it gets absorbed in the oceans and the vegetation, where it can stay for centuries or more. Quantifying the global carbon cycle in order to investigate its effect on climate change is an ongoing international scientific effort. In particular, scientists are trying to better estimate the carbon stored in the world’s forests. To do so, they rely on a suite of instruments and methods, such as networks of forest plots and measuring devices, experimental manipulations of ecosystems, and various kinds of computer models and remote sensing datasets.
In Central Africa, a region home to the second largest tropical forest biome after the Amazon, Gabon with its small, mostly urban population, and an economy fuelled by oil exports and relying on food imports, has attracted researchers interested in tropical ecosystems: forests cover 88 percent of the national territory, spreading right from the outskirts of the capital city. Across this territory, field sites, research stations, and networks of one-hectare plots delineated by discreet signs in situ (e.g., metallic tags) have been set up to study, measure, and monitor the forests. In any given forest plot, all trees are usually counted, identified at the species level where possible, and their diameter, sometimes also their height, measured. These measurements are the basis for estimating the carbon mass of a forest, equivalent here to the aboveground carbon mass of the trees. Data from Gabon’s forests collected in such sites are expected to contribute to the scientific understanding of carbon stocks in the tropics, and what it implies for the future of our planet. But, as we will see, forest measurements are equally central to climate policy.
The changes that the global climate is undergoing is, indeed, a matter of international concern, urging policy makers around the world to take action and limit the rise of the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide. In the mid 2000s, at the United Nations (UN) climate talks, the following idea started being discussed: developed countries could reward developing countries for reducing the carbon losses incurred from deforestation and forest
The understanding of the earth’s climate system and the commitments to prevent the loss of carbon-storing forestlands both rely on measurements, calculations, and estimates. My aim, therefore, is to talk about carbon in the Gabonese forests as an object of quantification.7 First, the chapter casts light on the technologies and people that make the infrastructure of carbon accounting needed to translate Norway’s promise into a payment. It then examines the development of a statistical model to indirectly weigh trees in tropical forests and a data campaign tailored to the needs of new space sensors. Finally, it returns to the bilateral result-based agreement and the political rhetoric of a green nation it feeds into. These four episodes each highlights a specific way in which scientific practices, technologies, funding arrangements, and politics come together to make a particular place—a highly forested country in Central Africa—have planetary significance. We will see African, European, and North American scientists looking at the forest as a global knowledge frontier and a resource to secure research funding, while governmental officials try to capitalise on the forest to find a solution to the ecological mess the world has gotten itself into.
The content of this chapter is based on fieldwork carried out in 2019. I conducted in-depth interviews with scientists, technical experts and government officials in Gabon, the United Kingdom (UK), and at an international scientific conference in Milan, Italy, while reading the scientific and technical literature our conversations alluded to.9 With this research, I wish to present an illustration of how, at a time of what Achille Mbembe calls the “combustion of the world” (Mbembe 2020, 17–25), Science and Technology Studies (STS) can engage with the planetary project of mitigating climate change, by paying attention to the way it plays out in specific African contexts.10
3 Environmental Sciences in Africa
A good place to start, in order to position this piece within STS, is Bruno Latour’s text on the “circulating reference” (Latour 1999, 24–79). In the Brazilian Amazon, the presence of identification tags (e.g., metallic tags) turns the savanna-forest landscape into a “minimalist” laboratory for soil scientists (Latour 1999, 32). By looking at the use of maps, protocols, sampling devices,
As soil samples are collected, or trees measured, the rest of the forest disappears, but this de-contextualisation does not imply that the field-as-lab is disconnected from everything else. Science, Latour further suggests, takes place in context within a “circulatory system” (Latour 1999, 80): standardisation of measurements, classifications, theories, methods, skills, instruments, but also political interests, infrastructures, and financial supports, are necessary to sustain scientific activities. We can turn to Paul Edwards’ (2010) history of climate modelling to see that the “vast machinery” of knowledge production about the habitability of our planet has built upon, among other things, the standardisation of meteorological observations in the age of empires, the possibility of a nuclear winter during the Cold War, and politicians in the United States deciding to fund more research instead of taking action. The object of this chapter—the carbon mass of tropical forests—belongs to that history, as a component of the Earth System that, in the last two decades, scientists have sought to integrate into their models using a variety of data, including from space sensors.11 But due to the immanence of forests in specific land areas, quantifying how much carbon the trees contain immediately raises particular context-related issues that climate modelling does not.
One issue that jumps to mind is that forests are most often inhabited. Knowledge and ignorance of vegetation dynamics inform decisions about how and by whom forestlands ought to be used, which may affect people’s lives and livelihoods (Fairheard and Leach 1995).12 This chapter, however, is concerned with a different type of context-related issue, namely the transnational
When it comes to tropical forests and carbon, international collaborations running the risk of turning into parachute research are not restricted to Africa. In her analysis of an international research programme (the Large-Scale Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia), Myanna Lahsen suggests that Brazilian policy makers experienced the “Northern dominance of science” as a threat to their control over the narrative about deforestation in the Amazon (Lahsen 2009, 362). All the while, the interest of European and US research funding agencies fluctuated depending on whether the data suggested the forests acted as a carbon sink or source (see also Fearnside 2009). Antonia Walford (2012), speaking about the same research programme, unpacks the micropolitics of fieldwork, showing that Brazilian scientists and technicians felt at times sidelined by foreign researchers appropriating the data obtained with their help. These examples show that trying to produce field-based environmental knowledge across such uneven terrains raises difficult context-related questions, such as scientific imperialism and territorial sovereignty.13
The carbon stored in tropical forests, in Central Africa and elsewhere, is hardly just a scientific research interest. In Gabon, public discourses depict a green nation with low deforestation rates and precious stores of carbon, that is simultaneously home to illegal logging activities and wide social disparities.
As I will now describe different efforts to quantify forest carbon stocks in Gabon, I propose to examine the interplay between seemingly trivial issues (disbursement procedures for field missions), political strategies (the environmental diplomacy of an autocratic regime), technical achievements (new space sensors to study the earth), and scientific discussions (around the validity of a unique equation to weigh tropical forests), in order to highlight both the short-term contingencies and long-term legacies through which particular forests may be seen to acquire planetary significance (which they can also quickly lose).
4
The Gabon-Norway deal announced in 2019 anticipated that carbon gains and losses could be estimated across tens of millions of hectares. The letter of intent stated that the African nation shall be rewarded for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (carbon losses from cutting down trees) and increasing the “removals from land remaining forest land” (carbon gains in re-growing forests) (CAFI 2019). Up to 150 million dollars could be transferred over ten years, starting retrospectively in 2016. The payment would be disbursed at an estimated rate of ten dollars per tonne of carbon dioxide. The Gabonese Space Observation Agency and the National Resource Inventory of Gabon Parks Agency were essential to the implementation of such an agreement. Since 2018, the two institutions were being supported by a programme called the Central African Forest Initiative, to which Norway was a major donor. Gabon had secured a grant from it to establish a carbon accounting infrastructure centered on field plot measurements and remote sensing data analysis.
The creation of earth observation facilities had been made financially possible through a debt cancellation agreement with France. Instead of paying the debt back, the Gabonese government committed fifty million euros to environmental and forestry programmes, of which ten million euros was to help create the Space Observation Agency. The French and Gabonese Presidents announced the debt swap in 2007 as they walked in the Arboretum near Libreville during a diplomatic visit epitomising the Françafrique (Bernard and Jakubyszyn 2008; Soir 3 Journal 2007).17 Twelve years later, the agency “is entirely managed by Gabonese,” emphasised its director on our way to the facilities twenty kilometres from the capital city.18 For him, “the biggest challenge was to train human resources, no one had professional skills in remote sensing in Gabon five years ago.” As I was shown around, and observed a huge antenna detect a nearby satellite (Figure 2.2), I met with engineers who received state scholarships to study abroad and came back with the required skills. They were busy interpreting archives of satellite images retrieved from American (Landsat) and European (Sentinel) optical sensors in order to map the evolution of land cover across the national territory. Datasets for 1990, 2000, 2005, 2010, and 2015 had already been analysed and independently validated. This work would be key to calculating the results Norway pledged to pay for (CNC 2020).
A ground antenna of the Gabonese agency for Earth observation, Nkok, Gabon
PHOTOGRAPH: BY THE AUTHOR
To convert area estimates into tonnes of carbon, field measurements and a different set of expertise and tools were needed (how exactly a carbon stock is obtained is discussed later). Providing such data was the job of the National Resource Inventory, a division of Gabon Parks Agency. The division was created
The inventory network was established following a sampling strategy in order to capture enough variations across the forest lands—one plot, for example, ended up in the Okoume-rich secondary coastal forest near Libreville (Poulsen et al. 2020, 3).20 For the purpose of carbon accounting, the 104 sites were classified by disturbance type: primary, secondary, and logged forests. These categories, and the corresponding field measurements, provided data to translate land-use change matrices into carbon losses and gains (CNC 2020). Carbon is lost if some units switch from, for example, forest land/primary forests to a non-forest category (e.g., settlement). To quantify the loss, the affected area size is multiplied by an emissions factor, which is an average carbon stock value per hectare derived from the subset of plots located in undisturbed (primary) forests. If, instead, the area is converted into secondary forests, another emission factor is used that is equivalent to the difference between the average carbon mass of primary forests and that of secondary forests (the latter obtained from the subset of plots in secondary forests). But if the forest remains untouched, its trees might accumulate more carbon. To quantify this
Conducting a forest inventory in dense tropical vegetation is no mean feat. Field agents travel from Libreville in small groups to distant locations, where they measure trees following standard protocols developed within the international scientific community. A botanist laconically summarised, “Some plots are far from the road, you might walk several days in the forest and camp there. Sometimes there are waterways. It’s hard.”21 Inventory teams usually visit nearby villages and hire volunteers to guide them through the forest. The work is dangerous (malaria, snakes, elephants, poachers, accidents) and costly. Cars, fuel, cellular phones, GPS, measuring devices, tents, gears, medicines, food, and cash for the helpers must be provided for. The operation of the National Resource Inventory, I was told, remained contingent on intermittent external funding and its workforce in a state of financial precarity.
In 2019, the Central African Forests Initiative was sponsoring the new census and oversight of the project had been delegated to the French Development Agency due to its long-standing presence in Gabon—a postcolonial legacy. The disbursement of tangible local currency bills was to follow strict procedures. Even buying food cans for field missions proved a hassle, involving quotes from a wholesaler, approval by the development institution, and payments by cheque. The administrator of the National Resource Inventory concluded that: “You can be sure I’m back in the store and I’m told they don’t have the cans anymore, or not enough, or a different type at a different price.”22 Before occupying this position, she was the head of cashiers in a big supermarket and, therefore, was quite certain that her small orders would never be the priority for a wholesaler. For the new field missions, as in the first census, she simply went to a supermarket, kept the receipts and filled in forms. These had been sent back full of “ineligibilities.” As it was the start of the project, an “operational incident” for non-compliance had not been raised yet. Retaining pledged money is not a rare thing to do for development agencies. At the French Development Agency’s office in Libreville, I learned that most of its forest-related programmes (e.g., on logging legality) had rather low rates of
Carbon accounting requires tracking changes in land areas over time and assigning them a value as loss or gain. The method, here, relied on remote sensing techniques and plot inventories, for which an adequate infrastructure and skillset had to be in place. To secure funding for it, two governmental agencies sought to mobilise multiple resources, while remaining dependent on external partners controlling the funds, a situation also shared by Gabonese scientists working in the field of tropical ecology, as we shall see now.
5 One Equation to Weigh any Tropical Forest
Field data collected during a forest inventory mainly consist in measurements of the diameter, and sometimes the height, of all the trees within a plot (except the tiny ones). Yet, the variable of interest to the Gabonese government, its Norwegian sponsors and the scientific community studying the carbon uptake of tropical forests, is the aboveground dry biomass of the trees (half of that is carbon). Weighing the forest poses an ecological-metrological dilemma as the most direct method requires harvesting trees. Trees are uprooted, cut into pieces, which are weighed on a scale brought into the forest, while samples of fresh wood are taken to a lab, dried, and weighed as well.24 The method is costly, extremely time consuming, and destructive. This is why an indirect method based on non-destructive measurements is used. But to translate diameter and height values into carbon stocks, some trees have to be sacrificed. In the 2010s, the Gabonese Research Institute for Tropical Ecology participated in two of such destructive sampling projects that aimed to improve some of the tools available to scientists for estimating the biomass of tropical forests.
Estimating the biomass of a forest depends on statistical techniques. Destructive sampling generates data suitable for establishing a relation, an allometric equation, between three (or four) variables: the first variable is biomass, while the two (or three) others are predictors and include one (or two) structural feature of the trees, their diameter (and sometimes the height), and a species-specific trait called wood density. In Gabon, once the first census of the plot network was completed, an allometric equation known as the
The pantropical model was developed through an international scientific collaboration initiated in the early 2000s. French ecologists with experience of working in French Guiana, together with colleagues from the United States and Japan, started compiling structural and mass measurements from published destructive sampling studies carried out in tropical forests since the 1950s (Viard-Crétat 2015, 344–46). Data from two thousand four hundred weighed trees were used to develop a first set of equations published in 2005 (Chave et al. 2005). But the geographical coverage of that dataset was limited: there were no trees from Africa. In response to this, funding became available to conduct destructive sampling studies on the continent. In Gabon, the Research Institute for Tropical Forestry channelled overseas aid from the European Commission to weigh one hundred trees from a logging concession in the northeast of the country (Ngomanda et al. 2014). As similar studies were done across the continent, an updated dataset was eventually published in 2014. It included four thousand sacrificed trees from fifty-eight sites—one in Gabon—based on which revised pantropical models were obtained (Chave et al. 2014).25
In addition to allometric relations, another global dataset was created around the same time, this one compiling wood density values, which are needed to convert volume into mass (Chave et al. 2009). Here, data for African tree species were easier to find. Some, for example, can be traced back to a 1955 report of the French Technical Centre for Tropical Forestry (Sallenave 1955). The report detailed the physical and mechanical properties of samples collected across the colonies in order to promote the commercial uses of these tropical woods. The work underpinning the report had begun after the first world war, as overexploited forests in metropolitan France drew attention to overseas territories. Before its independence in 1960, Gabon was a major source of timber and also a site of experimental forestry for its colonisers.26 One can, therefore, speculate that some of the wood used to quantify the density values
In Libreville, the office building of the Gabonese Research Institute for Tropical Forestry is another legacy of the colonial project as it used to host the French Technical Centre for Tropical Forestry. I met there with a senior scientist, a paleoecologist by training, who had lived abroad, in France and Germany, before returning to Gabon. The work of his institution relied on international sponsors, through research partners in Europe, the United States, and Japan, as well as technical aid programmes. The second destructive sampling study done in Gabon to weigh another hundred trees, which he was involved in, was made possible through a regional capacity building project. The World Bank managed the funding that came from a multilateral organisation (the Global Environmental Facility), and European consultants in Yaoundé, Cameroon, supervised the implementation in the six partner countries—Cameroon, Congo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Central African Republic, and Gabon (Fayolle et al. 2018). Reflecting on the institutional montage of the project, the ecologist remarked that, in these arrangements, “financial resources dedicated to scientific work is spent on management costs,” and so money is “lost in meetings,” while the project could have been more innovative scientifically speaking.27
One innovation discussed with enthusiasm by the ecologists and remote sensing scientists I spoke with was the use of commercial laser devices. In a forest, the laser sends a beam of photons that reflects on leaves and wood and generates three-dimensional point clouds containing billions of measurements. The visualisation of the point clouds looks like a forest. A group of UK-based remote sensing scientists have been particular active in pioneering the use of terrestrial laser scanning for volume (and biomass) estimates. At their university in London, the researchers were coding algorithms to infer, from the point clouds, the woody volume of the forests they had surveyed.28 Gabon was the first “tropical forest environment” in which they tested their laser in 2013. The instrument had since scanned ten thousand trees in Australia, the United States, Brazil, Peru, Malaysia, Ghana, and a couple more times in Gabon. The technology
To collect data and samples in Gabon’s forests, foreign researchers must enter a data sharing agreement with a national institution. In 2019, the Research Institute for Tropical Forestry was the partner of a new project co-led by the UK-based scientists, whose objective was to laser-scan trees in a forest concession in order to assess biomass (and carbon) changes associated with logging. The Gabonese institution had asked if they could also take the device to the coastal rainforest of the Arboretum and help study this puzzling ecosystem. From the perspective of underfunded scientists on the government’s payroll, in a context of reduced income due to the decline of global oil prices in 2014, external interests in the country’s forests could prove useful to sustain a national scientific community and try to carve out support for their own research agenda.
6 Ecological Representatives to Calibrate Space Sensors
Gabon’s forests have not only contributed dead trees to improve tools used by scientists to estimate the biomass of tropical ecosystems. These forests are also of value to the international scientific community as living ecological representatives. The enumerated materiality of carbon stored in terrestrial vegetation is an important element in the study of the earth conceptualised as an integrated system of biogeochemical cycles and energy transfers. In the last decade, space agencies such as the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the European Space Agency, have invested in new satellite-borne sensors that might provide datasets better suited to the needs
NASA’s light detection and ranging sensor (a laser) called GEDI, for Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation, was plugged to the International Space Station in December 2018 (GEDI 2019). Six months later, updates from the mission were presented at the Living Planet Symposium in Milan. “Taking the pulse of our planet from space” was the moto of the conference on the importance of remote sensing for Earth System sciences.31 GEDI was discussed in several talks, alongside BIOMASS, the satellite-borne radar that the European Space Agency aimed to launch in 2023. Some of these talks focused on a joint data collection campaign for GEDI and BIOMASS that took place in Gabon in 2015 and 2016. The campaign involved engineers and scientists from American, German, British, and French research institutions (Fatoyinbo et al. 2021). Planes were brought from the United States and France and equipped with instruments mimicking the future space sensors to fly over different forest types, as teams underneath trudged to field sites to measure the trees. The campaign had various purposes. One was to start developing algorithms to convert the height-related signal the sensors would record into mass estimates by using the field data as ground truth (diameter and hight measurements converted into mass via the pantropical allometric model).32 The remote sensing scientists I spoke with were acutely aware that these biomass estimates would be uncertain but there is currently no alternative.
When I asked why Gabon was selected for the campaign, a scientist from GEDI listed the following reasons: “it’s safe, so it minimised the security risk for the teams, and there’s a lot of forests, high biomass, with different types of forest, biologically and structurally diverse”, adding that “it’s an oil economy
A promotional video was published online about the GEDI mission and the data campaign in Gabon (NASA 2016). It shows a diverse group of scientists in hiking gear guided through a forest (the Arboretum) by Gabonese field agents. Images of a plane ready to take off and dense forests seen from above alternate with interviews in a studio. The researchers explain that in such a hot and humid climate “life constantly regenerates” and Gabon “has some really dense tropical forest that has not really been studied, extensively, especially from a remote sensing perspective,” reiterating the data gap argument (NASA 2016). They also emphasise the aim of the mission: to “balance the global carbon budget”—quantifying how much carbon is stored in the atmosphere, the oceans and the land—and ultimately improve the understanding of the Earth System. For NASA and its team of remote sensing scientists, what mattered was to find a variety of tropical vegetations for which airborne and ground data could be obtained to support the calibration and validation of a new space sensor (Figure 2.3).
A data campaign for new space sensors in a high forest—and low deforestation—country with diverse ecosystems, 2019 Living Planet Symposium in Milan, Italy
PHOTOGRAPH: BY THE AUTHOR
The 2015–2016 data campaign was actually not the first time that these forests were involved in remote sensing research. One of the first pantropical carbon stocks maps, which was published in 2011, was obtained with plot measurements from across the tropics, including in Gabon. The United States-based researchers leading the project needed field data to develop computational techniques to translate the signal recorded by a satellite-borne altimeter into a carbon map (Saatchi et al. 2011). The field measurements were obtained from research plots scattered across the continent—areas where the forest, its fauna or flora, had been studied by ecologists who, among other things, measured
When the objective is to take the pulse of our planet from space, tropical forest lands are discussed as a global knowledge frontier, about which more information should be obtained. No Gabonese representatives were interviewed in NASA’s promotional film, nor, as far as I was able to trace, present at the remote sensing conference in 2019 in Italy. A German scientist involved in the data campaign indirectly hinted at this absence. One of her slides displayed a photograph of a large group comprising the Euro-American teams, Gabonese state officials and younger people posing next to a plane. The photograph was taken during an outreach day and the researcher commented: “we also provided training in order not just to go and take the data”.37 It was a different photograph, but I also saw an image of one of the campaign’s aircrafts in the office of the director of the Space Observation Agency.38 The latter had negotiated access to a military air base and obtained authorisations for the flights. The remote sensing engineers I spoke with remembered the campaign well and talked fondly about the planes. As part of the outreach, data from the airborne instruments had been shared with them, although not much more followed and the engineers were unaware whether the sensors were already in orbit or not. The latest technological breakthroughs in earth observation were of little immediate relevance to their work, given that to assess land cover changes and implement the result-based agreement, they had to use archives of satellite images and time-tested methods.
Data related to forest biomass—which active sensors ought to generate—may be useful to constrain and evaluate the computer simulations underpinning the study of the earth’s climate system (Herold et al. 2019, 761–66). Here, the end goal of carbon quantification is to better understand large-scale biogeochemical cycles and the troubled state of our planet. But, as carbon-absorbing forests are immanent in land areas, their fate depends on land-use decisions, and the extent to which scientific evidence is influential there is uncertain. For the director of the Space Observation Agency, in Gabon, “because the forest covers nearly 90 percent of the territory, every human activity takes place in the forest, whether you build a road or a dam, you impact the forest,”39 hence the expectation that giving a monetary value to carbon would alter those decisions.
7
The result-based agreement with Norway was announced during the 2019 United Nations Climate Action Summit in New York, and Gabon’s National Minister of Water, Forests, the Seas and the Environment, gave a speech about it at a side event. He emphasised that “it’s almost more important to us that Norway is putting its faith and its reputation on the line alongside our own, that’s almost more important than the money” (Lang 2019). Norway’s offer of ten dollars per tonne of carbon dioxide avoided, double the price in its previous bilateral agreements, was applauded. To diplomats and experts, the minister described Gabon as “high forest, low deforestation” and this was presented as the outcome of development choices made by the previous and autocratic Presidents, who happen to be father and son. In Libreville, a month before the summit, a state official had told me that “Gabon wants to put forward the lack of international policy instruments suitable for countries with lots of forests.”40 Allied with Surinam and Guyana, the Gabonese delegation was pushing for the category of High Forest Cover Low Deforestation (HFLD) countries to be further recognised in climate discussions. The deal with Norway was expected to pioneer a policy attuned to HFLD s and simultaneously raise Gabon’s environmental profile internationally.
What the minister considered to be forest-friendly development choices are listed in the project documents written for the Central Africa Forest Initiative (CNC 2020, 7–10; CNC 2021, 19–24). These include: a forest code making sustainable management mandatory, associated with a ban on raw logs exports to sell higher value products and the engagement of multinational logging companies in private certification; a focus on nature conservation and national parks supervised by a governmental agency tasked with valorising their fauna and flora through scientific research and eco-tourism; and finally, private investments in industrial agriculture subjected to global sustainability criteria, especially palm oil production. In addition to these measures, the documents evoke Gabon’s involvement in UN negotiations. The scientific collaborations mentioned earlier (the African plot network and the pantropical carbon map) had, for example, been showcased at the 2009 climate meeting in Copenhagen, where European and American academics were in the Gabonese delegation. Yet, in the subsequent years, Gabon was much less visible in the REDD+ space. One reason was the focus on high deforestation countries; another was that the government said it wanted to engage with the global policy on its own terms,
From 2009, national policy making in Gabon became driven by the “Emergence” mantra. Political scientists briefly wondered (and quickly lost their illusions) whether it might announce a departure from the discretionary political regime in place since the late 1960s (Mouity 2012). They discussed, for example, the nomination of a scientist at the head of Gabon Parks Agency: the researcher was clearly competent for the job but his British nationality raised concerns (Mouity 2012, 49–50). In June 2019, the scientist became the National Minister of Water, Forests, the Seas, and the Environment. He first arrived in Gabon in the late 1980s to do fieldwork for his PhD in tropical ecology, and then worked for a US wildlife organisation to help establish new national parks, before being granted Gabonese citizenship as he took charge of the governmental agency in 2009 (Dougueli 2019). All the while, he continued to conduct research through an academic affiliation in the UK. Having a scientist who belonged to the President’s close circle certainly encouraged some of the international collaborations previously examined. As a foreign researcher involved in a couple of those projects put it: he was doing fieldwork in Gabon because he had “lots of contact high up there.”42 The country, another scientist summarized, was “a nice place to work”—if things remained as they were.43 One can reasonably assume that the nomination of a professor in ecology as forest minister boosted Gabon’s green capital on the global political scene, beyond the scientific community.44 Within the country, however, the white conversationist was less popular, especially in rural places where forest elephants regularly destroyed villagers’ crops and people rightly felt disenfranchised (Caramel 2021).45
In an interview about the bilateral deal with Norway, a French journalist asked the new minister about a scandal in the logging sector that cost his
In June 2021, Norway announced the transfer of a first instalment of seventeen million dollars as part of the result-based agreement (CAFI 2021). Only five dollars per tonne were paid for, instead of ten, as the higher price was contingent on methods and audit procedures still being developed by US-based consultants. The report presenting the results indicated that only emissions reductions were counted, not removals, and that a deduction was applied to account for the uncertainty of the estimates (CNC 2020). Carbon losses from deforestation, degradation, and logging in 2016 and 2017 were compared to, and found lower than an average historical level. The agreement aimed to reward improved performance, which may be hard to demonstrate if past performance was good. Given Gabon’s low deforestation rates, it had been expected that higher returns could be secured by also rewarding carbon removals (more carbon accumulating in forests remaining forests). But these carbon gains proved disappointing. Carbon storage in 2016 and 2017 was lower than the historical average. The decrease was explained by the early adoption of sustainable management practices in the forestry sector: with less intensively exploited forests, additional carbon uptake from regrowth had slowed down.
Despite being lower than expected, the first result-based payment received by Gabon was celebrated in online media, with photographs of charismatic
8 Conclusion
To conclude let me go back to the forest near Libreville, where I learned many things about the Okoume, Azobe, Ozigo, Alep, Okala, and Ozouga trees we passed by—what their wood is used for, the medicinal properties of their bark, roots, sap, and leaves, and their function in rituals. The eco-guide, who spent five years at a research station in the middle of the country assisting ecologists tracking mandrills, kept highlighting the multiple uses of the forest as a “pharmacy” where “everything is organic.”48 Her description of the place echoed the opening chapter of Raponda-Walker’s Les Plantes utiles du Gabon (Gabon’s Useful Plants): “In the vast ‘general store’ that is the Gabonese forest, even those with the most demanding needs would see them be met!” (Raponda-Walker and Sillans 1995, 30–31).49 Ethnobotany is, of course, a form of ordering and the Arboretum a place managed for recreational purposes, which large mammals such as forest elephants deserted long ago.50 Nevertheless, browsing
Walking in the Arboretum did not prompt an extensive conversation about carbon stocks. The metric is too abstract and becomes meaningful on the larger scale when, as shown in this chapter, data from a forest site are connected to more data from distant places, sometimes collected decades ago. Measuring trees is one small, yet essential step in long chains of measurements, calculations, and estimates. These involve allometric equations resulting from dozens of destructive sampling studies and thousands of sacrificed trees. The quantity estimates based on allometric equations can be used to translate land-use change matrices derived from satellite images—themselves the outcome of several billion dollars of investments in earth observation programmes and time-tested remote sensing techniques—into carbon losses and gains. Field measurements and mass estimates may also support the development of algorithms able to process signals recorded by new space-borne instruments. The expectation is that pantropical datasets would be useful to improve the simulation of the vegetation’s carbon fluxes in global climate models. Speaking with scientists, I came to understand that every measurement comes with some uncertainty, even at the level of one tree. I then realised that knowing this is already a move towards knowing more about what is happening in those forests, and to our planet, at a time when its habitability is a real matter of concern. Making sure that tropical ecosystems continue to clean up our planetary mess is, ultimately, what is at stake in this measurement frenzy, its unequal collaborations and interdependencies.
This chapter described funding arrangements, technologies, scientific practices, and political strategies, without which the mass of carbon stored in a forest would not be known, nor would anyone be interested in quantifying it. This led me to foreground big and trivial issues, both essential to the quantification effort—from the possibilities opened by active remote sensing, to tedious procedures for buying food supplies. It allowed me to highlight short-term contingencies (a foreign researcher in forest ecology becoming minister in an autocracy) and long-term phenomena (carbon accumulating in trees over centuries and the diffuse traces of the French colonial project) that must be considered to understand how particular forest lands come to have planetary significance and how this state of affair can suddenly change.
I wish to thank those who agreed to spend time with me to share their understanding of the challenges and implications of quantifying the carbon stored in tropical forests. Any mistakes are mine. I would also like to warmly thank the editors of this volume and the researchers of the African Technoscapes cluster in the Regions2050 project for their close reading of earlier drafts. Their suggestions, and our ongoing conversation, have been extremely helpful in making the text clearer and sharper. The chapter was discussed at the WiSER seminar, Wits University, in October 2021. This encouraged me to further tease out the argument and I would like to thank all the participants for their comments. The study was conducted while I was a postdoctoral research fellow at UCL’s Institute of Advanced Studies and affiliated to the Department of Geography. The conversations I had with the members of the Institute and the Department directly shaped this research and I am profoundly grateful to them for that.
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Arboterum, Libreville, August 25, 2019.
On the communities living around present-day Libreville and the trading relations with Europeans in the 19th Century, see M’Bokolo (1981).
The liana-dense areas of the forest were chosen for background filming in the 2016 Hollywood-produced The Legend of Tarzan.
Some of that carbon is re-emitted through respiration.
The + was added later and stands for: the role of conservation, sustainable management of forests and enhancement of forest carbon stocks. For an overview of REDD+, see Angelsen et al. (2018).
By scrutinising how carbon is counted and accounted for, this chapter contributes to the literature on “carbon accountability” (Gupta et al. 2013).
For a reflection on the meanings of uncertainty in comparable contexts, see Walford (2017) on the uncertain nature of data generated by a meteorological tower in the Brazilian Amazon and Goldstein (2022) on the tension between political and scientific uncertainties around carbon measurements in Indonesian peatlands.
This chapter directly builds on twenty-six semi-structured interviews, as well as observations and more informal conversations. I had planned to resume fieldwork in Gabon in 2020, but it was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As the data mobilised here is limited, I consulted researchers with relevant experience and knowledge to validate my interpretation.
In Mavhunga’s (2017, 7) typology, this chapter belongs to the body of works that follows “the traveling [of] Western artifact, idea, or expert” to Africa.
On the emergence of global ecology in response to climate change, see Kwa (2005).
Many case studies now document the local effects of monetising forest carbon for REDD+. To cite just one example, see Asiyanbi (2016).
Beyond carbon quantification, the sense of a loss of sovereignty in relation to forest expertise and policy reform is a major concern among governmental officials in Central Africa. For an illustration in Cameroun, see Ongolo and Karsenty (2015).
Author’s translation. As Bernault and Tonda (2009) suggest, Gabon is economically prosperous (compared to other countries in the region) due to its oil reserves and politically stable mainly because it has been ruled by one family since 1967. My understanding of the reference to Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness set in the colonial Belgian Congo, is that it alludes to the dehumanising racist image of Central Africa the novel conveys and maybe also to current problems in Gabon around the now illegal ivory trade, hence the contrast with the “environmental dream.”
Author’s translation.
“Inside-out Earth” was the title of Gabrielle Hecht’s lecture at University College London, October 23, 2019.
The French President’s trip to Libreville followed his visit to Senegal where he gave an infamous speech marked by colonial paternalism and racialised prejudices (Mbembe 2007).
Observations at the Space Observation Agency, Nkok, August 29, 2019.
The forest is here defined as an area of at least one hectare covered by at least thirty percent of trees that are at least five meters high.
The National Resource Inventory was intending to increase the number of plots to five hundred.
Interview 33, Botanist, Libreville, September 2, 2019.
Interview 35, National Resource Inventory Administrator, Libreville, September 4, 2019.
Interview 29, Junior Project Manager, Libreville, August 29, 2019.
For a similar dilemma in the measurement of body composition, see O’Connell’s (1993).
Different equations are proposed depending on whether height measurements are available or not. Inventory data in dense tropical forests might include only tree diameters as it is easier to measure.
The Technical Centre for Tropical Forestry communicated its findings in a technical journal, Bois et Forêts des Tropiques, still published today. In the 1950s, Gabon’s forests were frequently mentioned and the Mondah forest, where the Arboterum is now located, was a major research site for experimental Okoume plantations (Aubréville 1954).
Interview 36, Senior Ecologist, Libreville, September 4, 2019.
Interviews 1, 5, 6, and 15, Remote Sensing Scientists, London, November 15, 2018, February 7, 2019, February 19, 2019, and June 10, 2019. To convert 3D point clouds into meaningful information, algorithms are coded to extract each tree, separate the points associated with leaf material from wood material, and calculate a volume. Only 10 percent of the initial dataset may be useful.
Allometric relations provide precise estimates if the trees harvested and weighed to establish them are similar enough (same species, age distribution, climate, soil etc.) to the standing trees the biomass of which is quantified.
See Gabrys (2020) for a discussion of remote sensing and the planetary gaze.
Observations at the Living Planet Symposium, Milan, May 13–17, 2019.
Laser and radar sensors detect the forest’s height as the difference between the signal bouncing back at the top of the canopy and the signal hitting the ground. To establish a relation between height and mass, plot measurements are used to estimate biomass and computational techniques relate that value to the measured height. For a discussion of the conventional nature of similar measurements, see Mallard (1998).
Interview 13, Remote Sensing Scientist, Milan, May 16, 2019. French Guiana is another place where a joint campaign was carried out, see Viard-Crétat (2015) on this French overseas territory used as a laboratory for tropical ecology.
Observations at the Living Planet Symposium, Milan, May 13–17, 2019.
Interview 9, Global Change Scientist, London, March 25, 2019.
For example, some research plots in Gabon were “owned” by French scientists and others by a British researcher who would later become forest minister (next section).
Observations at the Living Planet Symposium, Milan, May 13–17, 2019.
Observations at the Space Observation Agency, Nkok, August 29, 2019.
Interview 25, Space Observation Agency Director, Libreville, August 27, 2019.
Interview 28, Governmental Official, Nkok, August 29, 2019.
The Space Observation Agency and the National Resource Inventory were created with resources not earmarked as REDD+. A National Climate Council attached to the Presidency was also established, which is now the focal point for REDD+ related programmes.
Interview 4, Remote Sensing Scientist, London, January 30, 2019.
Interview 10, Remote Sensing Scientist, Milan, May 14, 2019.
When the US White House convened its “Leaders Summit on Climate” in 2021, forty heads of state were invited and Gabon’s president was one of them (White House 2021). The only other representative from Central Africa was the president of the Democratic republic of the Congo, a country with eight times more forests and a population forty times larger.
Interviews 30 and 37, Environmental Civil Society Organisations 1 and 2, Libreville, August 30, 2019, and September 5, 2019.
The scandal was referred to as the “Kevazingogate.” Shipping containers with, allegedly, illegal kevazingo—a species selling at high prices in China—were seized, and then disappeared. The containers were eventually found but some went missing. The scandal was commented on in national and foreign media (BBC and Le Monde).
The possibility to adjust the performance assessment illustrates the vulnerability to gaming of REDD+ result-based initiatives (Karsenty and Ongolo 2012). See Hook (2020) for a similar discussion in the case of Norway’s partnership with Guyana.
Arboterum, Libreville, August 25, 2019.
Author’s translation.
On ethnobotany as ordering, see Langwick (2021).
This echoes Kialo’s analysis (2007), which juxtaposes the “economic forest” of French foresters with the forest of Pové people, home to human activities, a diverse fauna and flora, and an invisible domain.