The mystery around the donation of 2m carbon credits to a new Zimbabwean-based carbon exchange platform by the Belarus Africa Foreign Trade Association (Bafta) has deepened with an authoritative industry source reporting that Belarus has never earned carbon credits itself that it could donate.

The presentation of the credits was done by former President Jacob Zuma, a board member of Bafta, who handed over a novelty cheque at a meeting in Victoria Falls on Friday.

Fin24 reports that the cheque was for 2m ‘emission reduction units’ (ERUs).

Carbon Pulse, a subscription newsletter on carbon pricing and climate change policies, on Monday described the credits as ‘questionable’. 

Carbon credits are issued under the Kyoto Protocol Joint Implementation Scheme and are created when a project causes a reduction in carbon emissions that would have gone into the atmosphere. The credit can then be sold to an emitter, enabling it to decrease its own emissions and therefore its carbon tax burden.

It wrote: ‘There were few details available about the 2 million credits, making it unclear from where they were sourced or whether they were actual ERUs issued under the Kyoto Protocol’s Joint Implementation (JI) scheme. If they were in fact JI credits, they are unlikely to have come from Belarus as the country has not received any to date, according to UN data.’

The newsletter said that both Russia and Ukraine had earned most of the ERUs handed out between 2008 and 2020 but that these came from ‘projects suspected of having minimal environmental integrity’.

Full Fin24 report