| Gabon is sometimes described as a "giant broccoli," and from 3,500 feet up, it's easy to see why. During a two-hour flight from the capital, Libreville, to a cattle ranch in the southernmost province of Nyanga, the land below is a nearly unbroken stretch of textured green carpet, one of the world's largest intact rainforests. These trees are Gabon's superstars. They absorb and store millions of tons of earth-warming carbon dioxide each year, a critical function for the global fight against climate change. They also fuel the country's timber industry, a major focus of economic development during the past decade. The timber industry contributes about $1 billion to Gabon's annual gross domestic product. It could be a great deal more. Unlike some of its neighbors, the country strictly limits logging, palm oil production and other activities that lead to forest destruction; it's suffered less than 1% forest loss since 1990, compared with about 14% for continental Africa.  Photographer: Guillem Sartorio/Bloomberg Now that oil production, the country's primary source of revenue, is dwindling, leaders are reevaluating the money-making potential of the forests. Opening more land to timber companies is one option, but for now Gabon's environmentally minded government is more interested in keeping the trees alive—if the international financial markets can make it worthwhile. The best avenue for that, Gabon says, is the $2 billion-and-growing market for "carbon offsets." That's traditionally been limited to those who can document improvement on past environmental practices, not those who, like Gabon, never wrecked their forests in the first place. That's because for a carbon offset to fulfill its function of compensating for its buyer's emissions, it needs to have financed something that wouldn't have happened otherwise. But in Gabon, forest protection has been happening anyway. Still, Gabon insists it should be compensated for the air-purifying service its trees provide. Otherwise, it hints, its commitment to forest preservation may take a backseat to more traditional economic development. In its recent national action plan under the Paris Agreement, the global climate pact, the country says it plans to remain a "net-carbon absorber"—if it gets access to international finance through a carbon market. "There is no financial instrument to support Gabon to continue to offer this critical ecosystem service," Akim Daouda, the chief executive officer of Gabon's $1.9 billion sovereign wealth fund, said in an interview during a recent trip to London. "Can we monetize the forest and keep it for the rest of the planet? Or do we need to find a way to respond to the needs of our population?"  On the next episode of Getting Warmer, Kal Penn explores how the western US can cope with a long-term megadrought and whether recycled wastewater is a solution to the world's limited water supply. Watch on Bloomberg TV at 10 pm EST Wednesday, or stream online from Bloomberg Originals on Apple TV, Roku, Samsung TV, Fire TV or Android TV. The forest-based carbon offsets on the market today tend to be based on projects that seek to avoid emissions or increase carbon storage. Limiting deforestation usually qualifies; so could planting trees. Developers usually calculate how the forests fared under their control compared with a historical baseline, then sell the difference in units of extra tons of carbon removed or avoided as offsets. But because Gabon already has stringent restrictions on logging and there's little deforestation to speak of, projects there will need to take a different approach to the math. Gabon, which is planning to issue its own, sovereign carbon offsets, plans to tally the CO2 its trees suck out of the atmosphere, subtract its own emissions, and sell the difference to other, more polluting countries as "net sequestration" credits.  A year ago, Europe was sending $1 billion a day to Russia to buy fossil fuels. Now it pays only a small fraction of that. On the latest episode of Zero, reporters Will Mathis and Akshat Rathi explain how Europe managed this feat, and what it means for the continent's climate goals. Listen now — and subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or Google to get new episodes every Thursday. Anyone can issue carbon credits, and anyone can buy them. Most developers use third-party verification bodies to vouch for the quality of their offerings. Gabon doesn't plan to do so. Fledgling exchanges are also trying to streamline trade, but for now, over-the-counter, bilateral deals are the most common. It's not clear the markets will bite. Gabon's plans have been met with caution. It's yet to sell some 90 million credits it already generated for past carbon absorption using an established albeit contested approach. "It always makes me nervous when people say they're going to roll out their own methodology," said Danny Cullenward, policy director at nonprofit research group CarbonPlan. "It's really easy to manipulate the methodology intentionally or incidentally to produce outcomes that are less credible or inconsistent with other key points of data." This is an abridged version of today's Big Take. Read and share the full version of the story on the web. | 
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