Tolagnaro Littoral Forest Compensation Sites — QMM Ilmenite Mine (Madagascar)

QIT Madagascar Minerals (QMM), a Rio Tinto subsidiary, has mined ilmenite and zircon from littoral forest near Tolagnaro (Fort Dauphin) in southeastern Madagascar since 2008, in a project expected to run more than 40 years. The mining concession affects around 1,665 hectares of littoral forest, among the rarest and most threatened forest types on Earth.

To offset this loss, QMM created three protected forest sites: Bemangidy-Ivohibe (part of the 60,000-hectare Tsitongambarika Protected Area, roughly 4,000 ha), Sainte Luce forest (500 ha) and Agnalahaza forest (1,500 ha) — a combined ~6,000 hectares, about 3.5 times the area of forest slated for destruction. The NGO Asity Madagascar has managed on-the-ground conservation activity at these sites, with an estimated budget of at least US$350,000 over 2015–2019.

Academic and investigative reporting (Mongabay; a peer-reviewed ScienceDirect study of Madagascar mining offsets) has scrutinised the scheme against Rio Tinto's separate, independently evaluated Ambatovy offset elsewhere in Madagascar. Unlike Ambatovy — found on track for no net loss of forest in a 2022 Nature Sustainability study — QMM's offset habitat at Bemangidy-Ivohibe is lowland humid forest, ecologically distinct from the littoral forest being destroyed at the mine, a mismatch researchers say undermines the offset's "like-for-like" premise.

Reporting found forest-patrol workers paid around 25,000 ariary (roughly US$6.80) per month in 2018, well below Madagascar's contemporaneous minimum wage of 170,000 ariary (roughly US$45), while Rio Tinto's global revenue that year (roughly US$40 billion) dwarfed Madagascar's entire GDP (roughly US$12 billion). The Fondation pour les Aires Protégées et la Biodiversité de Madagascar (FAPBM), which joined the offset-linked COMBO+ programme, has itself stated that questions about funding sustainability, effectiveness and greenwashing risk remain openly unresolved.

Read the full analysis: https://www.fapbm.org/en/biodiversity-conservation-in-madagascar-do-no-net-loss-commitments-help/