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At low tide, Hélène Sonko wades through the muddy mangrove forest surrounding the town of Joal-Fadiout, in the Saloum river delta of western Senegal. A salty breeze whistles from the Atlantic Ocean as Sonko, wearing white overalls and reinforced work gloves, pauses in thick clay and brackish water that’s up to her knees. One by one, she pries oysters from the mangroves’ dense roots and drops them in a pink plastic basket floating alongside her.

It’s hot, arduous work, but collecting and selling shellfish allows Sonko, a 42-year-old single mother, to support her family and send her five children to school.

This wasn’t always the case. A drought in the 1970s spurred a mass die-off that ultimately killed more than one-third of Senegal’s mangroves. Famine crippled the region, rates of malnutrition and poverty soared, and only small, underdeveloped oysters remained in the Saloum delta. Decades later, neither the shellfish nor the mangroves had recovered. As late as the 1990s, recalls Sonko, speaking in French, “we could come back with nothing.”

Hélène Sonko planted mangroves in Senegal’s Saloum delta. The mangrove forest helps her support her family, but she and other local women question whether they were treated fairly for their planting work. Photo by Jack Thompson

So when someone representing a Senegalese NGO called Oceanium approached Sonko and other local women in 2009 to restore the village’s mangroves as part of what was billed as the world’s largest mangrove restoration project, the women happily agreed. Over three years, 300 women from Joal-Fadiout planted tens of thousands of mangrove saplings. Other communities in the Saloum delta and in southern Senegal’s Casamance delta undertook similar work, ultimately restoring 10,410 hectares of mangroves.

“It helped us a lot—today we have lots of oysters in the mangrove,” says Sonko.

Mangroves aren’t just helpful for local economies and ecosystems. Because they can store up to five times more carbon than terrestrial rainforests, they’re also emerging as an important tool in fighting climate change. The women of Joal-Fadiout didn’t know it, but their work was funded by carbon credits bought by 10 European companies—including the food company Danone and the luxury clothing brand Hermès—to offset planet-warming carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases they pump into the atmosphere.

This kind of carbon trading makes sense in theory. Private companies invest in carbon sequestration projects like reforestation or ecosystem protection, and in return, they receive a verified credit for keeping one tonne of carbon out of the atmosphere. Companies benefit by showing the public that they care about the planet, while money flows to environmental projects around the world. In Africa alone, carbon credits are expected to rise 19-fold from 2021 to 2030; investors from the United Arab Emirates recently pledged to buy US $450-million worth of African carbon credits. The area covered by these credits is 10 percent of Liberia’s landmass and 20 percent of Zimbabwe’s.

But carbon trading is under increasing scrutiny. With little government regulation, the task of ensuring that carbon offsets actually keep carbon out of the atmosphere often falls to third-party companies. A 2023 Guardian investigation, however, revealed that 90 percent of rainforest carbon offsets approved by the world’s largest third-party certifier, Verra (which validated the Saloum delta project), did not represent real reductions in emissions. Critics say that offsets allow corporations—including oil and gas producers—to justify emissions rather than actually reduce them. Credits that overestimate how much carbon they stock away could even raise the overall concentration of atmospheric greenhouse gases by giving companies rein to release more carbon than they’d otherwise be allowed.

Additionally, the social costs of carbon trading can be steep. As I traveled through the Saloum delta interviewing Sonko and other people who planted mangroves for global carbon projects, I found that many felt exploited. International companies and NGOs pay local workers substandard wages, obscure their own finances, and rarely involve communities in project designs. Local communities also receive no share of the revenue generated by the projects they contribute to, aside from meager wages for planting mangroves.

As more carbon-credit projects are developed in Africa, these issues raise serious questions: Are local people being treated fairly? And if not, who is benefiting?

While her children are in school, Sonko spends her morning in the mangroves, digging through clay to retrieve oysters and ark clams. Clamshells tossed by local people over millennia have built up to form two islands in the Saloum delta, including one that now houses thousands of residents. These islands, along with burial mounds made from shells, reveal the deep roots linking mangroves, shellfish, and communities.

On a good day, gathering and selling shellfish can net Sonko anywhere from 5,000 to 20,000 Communauté Financière Africaine francs, or CFA francs (US $8 to $30). Sonko belongs to a local women’s cooperative called Mboga Yaye, which processes the shellfish and sells them to residents, hotels, and tourists through a collectively managed shop and restaurant. To reduce the pressure on shellfish stocks, co-op members have also built beehives in the mangroves so they can produce and sell honey.

Fadiouth island, in Senegal’s Saloum delta, is made of shells discarded by local people over thousands of years, many of which grew in the mangrove forests surrounding the island. Photo by Mariusz Prusaczyk/Alamy Stock Photo

When her work is done, Sonko retreats to the shade of the cooperative’s processing center. Sitting among her colleagues, she sighs and tells me about the years when the women first planted these mangroves. In 2009, Karim Sall, president of a Senegalese NGO called Agire—acting on behalf of Oceanium—asked if the women’s cooperative wanted to do replanting work for 2,000 CFA francs ($3) per person per day.

“2,000 CFA is not good” for work so exhausting and dangerous, says Sonko. Women began work as early as 5:00 a.m. and often cut themselves on sharp shells and roots while trudging barefoot through the thick clay. “We did it for the love of the mangroves,” she clarifies. Additionally, the women didn’t know that the money they were paid had originally come from wealthy European companies. If they had, perhaps they would have asked for more compensation.

I only learned about the origins of the project myself while in the area on a birdwatching tour. As spoonbills dived and waders strutted through the flowing delta, our boat driver pointed out young mangroves from the replanting effort. Back in the capital, Dakar, where I live, I did some digging and found that the mangrove planting was part of a flagship carbon-credit project from a Paris-based firm called Livelihoods Funds. Their website promised it would produce “high social and environmental credits” for investors.

The 10 European companies that funded the project did not disclose how much they paid Livelihoods Funds. While I was reporting this story, however, Livelihoods Funds confirmed that the project budget was US $4.4-million, to be paid to Oceanium to carry out the logistics and oversee the carbon accounting over a 20-year period. Oceanium then contracted with Agire and other small NGOs to get nearly 80 million trees into the ground.

To get an outside perspective on the project, I called Marie-Christine Cormier-Salem, an academic from the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development, who has spent decades researching Senegal’s mangroves. When I first spoke with her on Zoom, she criticized the effort, describing communities’ anger over monoculture planting, low pay, and the way the work commoditized a communal resource for private gain. She encouraged me to visit the mangrove communities to see for myself—which is how I came back to the Saloum delta, ultimately speaking with over 20 women in five communities.

When I share the details of the project with Sonko and her colleagues at the women’s cooperative, the languid afternoon becomes tense. None of the women, either here or in the other villages I visit, know where their paychecks came from. Sonko snaps her fingers—a sign of indignation—and quick-fire Wolof, the lingua franca of Senegal, reverberates around the circle.

Hélène Sonko and other women return to their homes in the village of Joal-Fadiout, Senegal, after checking on beehives that they keep in the surrounding mangroves. Photo by Jack Thompson

Sonko and her community have experienced tangible benefits from mangrove restoration. In addition to the vast carbon sink they’ve helped restore, they can collect more oysters, harvest more fish, and have more habitat for their honeybees. Mangroves also protect communities from rising seas—a pressing issue in Senegal, where 60 percent of the population is concentrated in coastal areas. A 2018 impact study paid for by Livelihoods Funds reports that across the region, the benefits of increased fish, oyster, and shrimp from mangrove restoration are valued at over $6-million, although the company doesn’t share how it calculated those benefits.

Still, it’s difficult to balance these with the project’s shortcomings. “We know it’s the NGOs and their partners who are earning millions,” says Sonko. “Not us.”

Karim Sall, the president of Agire, was the middleman between Oceanium and local communities. Through interviews with Sall and his counterparts at Oceanium, I learned that communities were paid 10,000 CFA francs ($22) per hectare restored. This amounts to just 5.2 percent of the total $4.4-million project budget. Where did the rest of the money go?

To find out, I start by calling a former employee of Oceanium, who agrees to speak with me on the condition of anonymity. He tells me that a significant amount of the project budget was spent on carbon auditors, who charge up to $2,000 a day. Carbon-credit registration from Verra costs hundreds of thousands of dollars more, he says.

Gilles Dufrasne, an expert at Carbon Market Watch, a nonprofit watchdog and research organization based in Brussels, Belgium, confirms that verification and auditing is one of the biggest expenses of carbon credits. This hugely expensive process would be “defensible if [verification and auditing] were a bulletproof framework that guaranteed the integrity of credits, but we know they aren’t,” he says. In other words, the expense of verifying and auditing carbon credits might make sense if the projects were actually leading to less carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, but that rarely seems to be the case. One study of 2,000 carbon-offsetting projects verified by a third party estimated that only 12 percent resulted in real carbon reductions.

Additionally, says Dufrasne, carbon trading doesn’t require financial transparency, making it hard to determine who’s profiting. The long line of actors involved in any one project—intermediaries like Livelihoods Funds, project developers like Oceanium, carbon consultants, local NGOs, workers doing the planting—further muddies the process.

A mosque rises above the village of Joal-Fadiout. Photo by Friedrich Stark/Alamy Stock Photo

In the Global South, the situation is even more complicated, because cheap labor and free access to land often transform the economics of carbon trading. Research consultancy Thunder Said Energy calculates that in the United States, mangrove restoration labor is valued at $15 an hour. This, along with fees for land leasing, makes up 60 percent of US mangrove restoration budgets, helping to set the price of carbon at $130 per tonne. For the Livelihoods Funds project in Senegal, however, labor only accounts for 5.2 percent of the project budget, and Livelihoods doesn’t pay communities for access to their land. Here, the forecasted cost for one tonne of carbon is just over $3.

Such low prices don’t cover the environmental cost of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, nor do they allow for communities to share in the benefits of carbon credit programs, says Adriaan Korthuis, cofounder of the Dutch climate finance consultancy Climate Focus. In a later email, Korthuis added that while carbon markets aren’t necessarily the best way of financing nature protection and restoration projects, they can be an important source of funding—especially in the absence of other funding sources.

Other experts disagree that carbon trading should be a solution at all. Taxing companies that pollute and using the money to help rectify systemic injustices would be a far better solution, argues Frédéric Mousseau, policy director at the US-based think tank Oakland Institute. Or perhaps companies could continue to finance nature-restoration projects without attaching carbon credits to them, as Dufrasne of Carbon Market Watch suggests.

None of these solutions, however, is realistic in the near future. The nations and corporations responsible for the most greenhouse gas emissions seem to prefer carbon credits, which allow them to continue polluting as long as they pay to compensate for it, Mousseau says.

Plus, not everyone believes that paying next to nothing for labor and selling carbon at low prices is exploitative. The Oceanium employee who spoke anonymously says that because communities directly benefit from healthy mangroves, he would have preferred to keep the replanting voluntary: “It’s a shame that [the carbon credit program has] monetized an activity that people used to do without funding.”

In an email, Livelihoods Funds confirms that Oceanium did not want women to plant the mangroves just to make money; the Senegalese NGO wanted communities to take more ownership over the restoration. But Sonko and other participants say they were not consulted for the project design and that their intimate knowledge of local mangrove ecosystems was ignored. It’s an injustice that echoes the colonial model of many 20th-century conservation projects in Africa. The project, Cormier-Salem says, ignores “who [Senegalese people] are, what their needs are, and their aspirations.”

To the untrained eye, the mangroves outside Joal-Fadiout look like a healthy forest. But to someone like Sonko, it’s more a plantation than a natural ecosystem. “There’s nothing natural about it,” Sonko tells me. She, Cormier-Salem, and others allege that because it was cheaper and easier, Oceanium planted only one species of mangrove, from the genus Rhizophora, in a large portion of the project area. Before the drought in the 1970s, seven species from four genera grew in the Saloum delta.

Cormier-Salem warns that the monoculture forest will be more susceptible to disease, extreme weather, and ecological changes caused by global warming. Studies also show that Rhizophora growth in the Saloum delta is slowing or even blocking natural regeneration of other mangrove species, and that reforestation should focus on species from the more resilient genus Avicennia, also known as the black mangrove for its grayish color and leathery leaves. However, Avicennia is significantly more expensive because it needs to be grown in a nursery first.

The newly planted mangroves in Senegal’s Saloum delta may appear to be a healthy ecosystem, but some local people consider them to be more like a monoculture plantation. Photo by Jack Thompson

In an email, another Oceanium employee, Madické Seck, counters that multiple species of Rhizophora were used and that Avicennia was rarely planted because of its high mortality rate.

Despite warnings that large-scale mangrove restoration strategies may be ecologically unsound, developers are pushing forward with new projects. Last year, Swiss carbon trader Allcot started a 7,000-hectare monoculture project in Senegal. In 2019, Oceanium partnered with Belgian offsetting firm WeForest to restore another 7,000 hectares. That project pledged to plant 10 percent of the land with the costlier Avicennia genus, but when I visit a WeForest site 48 kilometers from Joal-Fadiout, communities say the project was planted too hastily and in places unsuitable for mangroves. Fishing captain Samba Diouf, who ferried planters back and forth to sites in the mangroves, says many of the 1,300 hectares they planted have already died.

“They pushed it too far to make money but not to have good results,” says Diouf.

The rhythm of life in the mangrove forest is dictated by the tide. When it’s low enough to cross the delta again, Sonko and I set off through viscous mud to the cooperative’s beehives, deep within the mangroves. The salty-sweet honey is coveted by hotels in the capital, and Sonko’s cooperative earned $5,000 from selling it in 2023.

Sonko pacifies the stinging bees with smoke from a small metal kettle and opens the homemade hives to refill the bees’ drinking water. She checks each hive for needed repairs. After she’s tended to a dozen hives, Sonko heads back to the co-op, where she changes from her beekeeping gear into a matching red dress and headscarf.

It’s evening by now and the tide is still falling, the crepuscular light illuminating the mangroves’ sinewy roots. The mosque’s call to prayer—a sound as regular as clockwork in this majority Muslim country—punctuates the women’s relaxed chatter as they wrap up for the day. Sonko keeps some oysters to sell fresh, and lays others out to dry. Her colleagues stow away broken beehives. Tomorrow, they’ll fix the beehives and turn the dried oysters into potent dried cubes for flavoring stews. Tomorrow, perhaps, they’ll continue to discuss whether the lack of agency and poor pay were worth the bounty they’re reaping.

For now, though, it’s time to go home to the families they work so hard to support.