Around half of West Africa’s remaining rainforests are in the small coastal nation of Liberia. They’re home to species like western chimpanzees and pygmy hippos, valuable stands of hardwood — and hundreds of thousands of people. Despite years of logging reforms backed by foreign aid, Liberia lost more than 38,000 hectares (94,000 acres) of humid primary forest in 2024 , driven by factors including agriculture, unsustainable logging and mining.

A group of 28 communities in Liberia may have a solution, and it’s an elegantly straightforward one: Pay them to keep the forest standing.

Under a new pilot project in southeastern Sinoe county, the government of Ireland is set to pay those communities $1.50 per hectare (2.5 acres) of forest they protect annually for the next two years. Fifty thousand hectares (124,000 acres) in two community-controlled rainforests are included in the pilot, with residents hoping to collectively receive $75,000 each year — about twice what a logging company would have paid them in land rental fees.

The money will be spent on development projects chosen and funded by the communities themselves, with some oversight by the Liberian organization managing the pilot.

That organization, Integrated Development and Learning, hopes it can find enough funding to scale up the pilot to a total of 200,000 hectares (494,000 acres) of rainforest.

“It’s taking some responsibility and saying these communities are doing something for all of us, for the planet and environment, and therefore they need to be rewarded. They need to be incentivized for that,” said Silas Siakor, a long-time environmental campaigner and founder of IDL.

Siakor was the recipient of the 2006 Goldman Environmental Prize, which he won for his work investigating illegal logging by the wartime administration of former President Charles Taylor. Afterward, he successfully campaigned for forestry laws that enabled Liberian communities to take a leading role in managing their own resources.

Passed in the wake of Liberia’s civil war, those laws are some of the most progressive in Africa. Under them, people in rural areas now have the right to set up community forests and secure collective land titles, which empower them to decide what activities are permitted in the forests they call home.

But forest conservation has typically lost out to activities that earn money for those communities, whether through the quick benefits offered by logging and mining companies or via crops produced by destructive agricultural practices.

“Agriculture is one of the major drivers of deforestation, but in Sinoe, mining is also a major driver,” Siakor said.

In nearby parts of Liberia’s southwest, some community leaders have invited migrant workers from Côte D’Ivoire to set up illegal cacao farms. These farms are reportedly destroying primary forest at an alarming rate.

“The conversation with [communities] over the years has been, ‘How do we create economic opportunities in this region?’ They’re blessed with so much biodiversity and forest, but that’s also become a hindrance to their own development,” Siakor said.

For years, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) programs have been advanced as a potential solution, offering financial rewards for protecting forests through carbon credit sales. But the regulatory framework has been slow to arrive, and no projects have been developed in Liberia despite decades of talk.

The new initiative in Liberia’s southeast is taking a different tack. Unlike REDD+ programs, which only pay out after years of complex monitoring and require expensive carbon credit brokers, this project will make up-front “area-based payments” to the participating communities. Funders aren’t looking to offset their own emissions and are instead taking what’s called a “non-market approach” to protecting forests under Article 6.8 of the Paris Agreement.

This lesser-known subsection of Article 6, which also covers carbon offsetting, is set to be a priority for the 20 “United for Our Forests” countries at this year’s COP30 climate negotiations. Collectively, those countries hold more than 62% of the world’s remaining tropical forests.

The project in Liberia will be a case study in what a non-market approach to carbon sequestration might look like in practice.

“The big thing is this is a way to get money to local people and Indigenous communities, because the carbon market, even though it talks about that, it doesn’t do it,” said Art Blundell, former chair of the U.N. Security Council’s monitoring panel on forestry in Liberia.

The 28 communities participating in the pilot are clustered into two groups that have gone through the legal process for registering their land. Each is responsible for managing a patch of forest, some of which borders Sapo National Park.

Under the agreements they’ve signed with IDL, activities like farming, building new settlements, burning wood for charcoal or felling commercial logs are prohibited in areas they’ve set aside for conservation.

“They’ve done the land use planning and said this is the area we can use, and this is the area we’ll set aside to earn revenues through conservation,” Blundell said. “It’s really pragmatic and not too fancy, so it doesn’t require a bunch of intensive monitoring to make sure they’re meeting their commitments.”

Officials from Liberia’s Forestry Development Authority will help train community monitors to patrol their forests for intruders, and funders can monitor compliance with the agreements through satellite analysis and site inspections.

If the communities don’t hold up to their side of the bargain, the annual payments will be docked. But if they do, they’ll get cash payments to spend on their own priorities.

“The big difference is putting the decision-making authority around how to use that income squarely in their hands, so they can set their own agenda and be able to invest it in ways that mean a lot to them,” Siakor said.

Around half of the overall income from the project will go to IDL and the Liberian government to cover the costs of technical assistance, but the rest will go directly to the 28 participating communities.

“It doesn’t need lots of expensive foreigners as part of the deal to be either brokers or analysts or consultants. It avoids all of that,” Blundell said.

While decisions over what to spend the money on will be in the hands of community management bodies, IDL will monitor expenditures for any irregularities.

The project was officially launched in July, and the first payments are being distributed to the communities now. There’s still much that’s uncertain — IDL doesn’t have a funder beyond the initial two-year pilot yet, and if no donor steps in, the initiative could collapse. But if it goes well, it could change how conservation works in Liberia — and potentially elsewhere in Africa.

“Some people felt it was too good to be true until they actually signed a commitment that set up the bank account and funds started to flow in. Now that it’s happening, it’s such a big deal to them,” Siakor said.

Banner image: A woman walks through a forest in Liberia. Image by Open Government Partnership via Flickr (CC BY-2.0)

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