Sinoe County's Satellite-Verified Community Forest Payments — Liberia's Article 6.8 Pilot

Liberia lost more than 38,000 hectares of humid primary forest in 2024 — its highest deforestation rate on record — even though the country still holds roughly half of West Africa's remaining rainforest. In July 2025, Integrated Development and Learning (IDL), founded by 2006 Goldman Environmental Prize winner Silas Siakor, launched a two-year pilot in Sinoe County funded by the Government of Ireland.
Twenty-eight communities, organised into two land-registered clusters bordering Sapo National Park, are paid $1.50 per hectare per year to keep agreed forest areas standing, with farming, new settlement, charcoal production and commercial logging prohibited inside them. Instead of generating tradeable carbon credits, payments use the Paris Agreement's "non-market approach" under Article 6.8, which Liberia's national carbon-market policy explicitly supports. Compliance is checked through satellite analysis and site inspections, with community forest monitors trained directly by Liberia's Forestry Development Authority; payments are reduced if commitments are not met.
By September 2026, one year in, the two community clusters had received a combined $150,622 in area-based payments. IDL reports that the more durable impact came from linked livelihood schemes: 52 village savings-and-loan groups in one cluster and 20 in the other generated over $263,000 in local savings activity in 2025 alone — more than the forest payments themselves — alongside cassava-processing machines and motorbikes to improve women's access to markets. A second, EUR 399,862 phase funded by Ireland runs from September 2026 to December 2027 to consolidate and extend the model.
The pilot is still small (50,000 of a targeted 200,000 hectares) and dependent on a single two-year donor commitment with no confirmed long-term funder; no independent, peer-reviewed measurement of avoided emissions or biodiversity outcomes has yet been published, so the evidence base is programme reporting and independent journalism rather than third-party verification.

Read the full analysis: https://www.liberianobserver.com/news/when-forest-protectors-are-rewarded-they-smile-more/article_5cb5f6be-53d9-4d57-953e-1c6df0bdb95b.html