Africa’s vast natural resources hold enormous potential to drive climate action and sustainable growth, but turning that potential into investment requires collaboration, integrity and readiness. From 21 to 23 October, the Carbon Markets Africa Summit (CMAS) in Johannesburg will bring together over 280 policymakers, investors and project developers from 40 countries to accelerate the continent’s participation in high-integrity carbon markets.
Hosted by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), with AUDA-NEPAD as strategic institutional partner and One Carbon World as official climate impact partner, CMAS marks the first continental event dedicated to unlocking Africa’s carbon value through integrity, investment and impact.
“Carbon markets can unlock billions in finance for the continent,” says Maxwell Gomera, Resident Representative of UNDP South Africa and Director of the Africa Sustainable Finance Hub. “With the right partnerships and governance, Africa can convert its natural wealth into climate-resilient growth and jobs.”
For Madeleine Garlick, Africa Director at One Carbon World, partnerships are key: “African innovators are leading the market now, but with collaboration, we can achieve the scale needed to ensure it delivers for everybody.”
Turning ambition into action
The summit’s theme of collaboration is reflected in its sponsors: TASC, an award-winning developer of high-impact carbon projects, is the diamond sponsor, joined by FSD Africa, SGS, and Trees for the Future as gold sponsors, and GIZ and Carbon Coin as silver sponsors.
“Our projects are having a monumental impact at a grassroots level—all this enabled through carbon finance,” says Shelley Estcourt, CEO Africa at TASC. Francesca Cerchia, Global Head of Climate Solutions at SGS, adds: “We need to make sure Africa is at the centre of voluntary carbon market development.”
Meanwhile, Tim McLennan, CEO of Trees for the Future, notes: “Farmers are the most vulnerable to climate change; our mission is to assist them to restore land and unlock prosperity.”
Scaling Africa’s solutions
With participation from nine African governments—including Comoros, DRC, Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, and Uganda—and 14 innovative carbon projects, five of which are raising capital, CMAS will showcase how the continent’s solutions are both local and transformative.
“The carbon economy is global, but its solutions are local,” says Chidalu Onyenso, Founder and CEO of Earthbond (Nigeria). Another expert speaker at the summit, Nicole Dewing, Co-Founder of Africa Carbon & Commodities (Senegal), explains that: “High-integrity plastic credits can underwrite a circular economy where communities earn, oceans recover and investment delivers verifiable impact.”
Driving a just transition
CMAS features a full programme of ministerial and investor roundtables, technical workshops, and sector dialogues featuring pan-African projects and pioneers in energy and cookstoves, blue carbon, nature-based solutions and urban circularity.
According to Gabriel Labbate, Global Team Leader of the UN-REDD Programme (UNEP), “Initiatives like the REDD+ Investments in Africa Roundtable at CMAS are crucial to bridging the gap between supply and demand and turning ambition into implementation.”
As Daniel Okoth, Head of Carbon at SunCulture (Kenya), puts it: “We’re not just creating carbon credits—we’re creating climate-smart livelihoods.”
Marc Baker, Director of Carbon Tanzania, adds: “We are at an inflection point in the carbon markets, with growth, increasing integrity and the emergence of Article 6.2 providing opportunities for scale.”
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