On a hot March afternoon in Dodoma, Tanzania’s political capital, the conference room looked unremarkable: national flags, nameplates, a projector humming at the back. What made the gathering unusual was not the setting but the sectors on the agenda, and the ambition quietly attached to them.
Across the table, officials from Tanzania and Djibouti traded slides on shipping routes and flight paths, not just as infrastructure but as potential streams of climate revenue.
They had convened on March 25 to launch strategic talks on a joint carbon‑trading framework for aviation and maritime transport. This partnership could turn the emissions from ships and planes crossing African ports and airspace into money for the continent’s own climate response.
The initiative links Tanzania’s National Carbon Monitoring Center, a government body created under environmental law to coordinate carbon‑market activities, with Djibouti’s Africa Sovereign Carbon Registry Foundation, which has built a national carbon‑pricing system for vessels using Djibouti’s ports.
In the language of the officials who announced it, the goal is explicit: to move toward a “unified, transparent and credible African carbon system” and keep more climate‑finance revenue inside Africa.
This story matters now because Tanzania and Djibouti are testing whether African states can use control over ports and airspace to set their own carbon‑pricing terms amid a broader shift toward global carbon markets and tighter climate rules on shipping and aviation.
Background and Stakes
The Dodoma talks come at a moment when global carbon markets are expanding, and African leaders are pushing to avoid being, as one Tanzanian official put it privately, “mere spectators and suppliers of cheap credits.”
Under the Paris Agreement’s Article 6, countries can trade emissions reductions, known as internationally transferred mitigation outcomes, to help meet their climate targets. At the same time, voluntary carbon markets have grown into a multibillion‑dollar arena covering everything from forest conservation to renewable‑energy projects.
Djibouti has already positioned itself in this landscape. In 2025, it launched a national Article 6 framework under the Africa Sovereign Carbon Initiative, issuing sovereign carbon credits from the Ghoubet wind farm after international certification of avoided emissions.
The Africa Sovereign Carbon Registry has promoted a model in which African states tax or price emissions from ships using their ports, drawing inspiration from the European Union’s maritime emissions rules but adapting them to African legal and fiscal systems.
Tanzania, for its part, has been tightening its own carbon‑governance machinery. Environmental regulations issued in 2022 and amended in 2023 expanded the mandate of national authorities to oversee carbon trading, including plans for a national registry to track credits and mobilize climate finance for domestic projects.
The National Carbon Monitoring Center, established a decade earlier and hosted at Sokoine University of Agriculture, was tasked with building capacity to measure, report, and verify emissions across sectors so that Tanzania could benefit more from international trading.
The Dodoma meeting, reported by national and regional outlets, ties these threads together. Under the emerging framework, airlines and shipping companies using Tanzanian and Djiboutian infrastructure would be required to report their emissions and contribute financially to mitigation projects across the continent, with payments channeled through nationally controlled systems.
If implemented, it could create a new revenue stream linked to two of the most carbon‑intensive sectors serving African economies, and signal a shift from selling scattered project‑level credits to asserting sovereign control over transport‑related emissions. The quiet logic is straightforward:
whoever controls the chokepoints of trade can, in principle, also control how the climate bill is written.
Ground‑Level Realities
Around the Dodoma table, the framing mixed climate urgency with fiscal pragmatism. Dr. Richard Muyungi, Permanent Secretary at Tanzania’s Vice President’s Office for Union and Environment, pointed to the country’s strategic assets, including major seaports such as Dar es Salaam and Tanga, and international airports that connect landlocked neighbors to global markets.
Integrating those gateways into a carbon‑pricing system, he argued, could “significantly enhance regional cooperation and climate financing,” turning emissions that currently go untaxed into funding for local adaptation, renewable‑energy projects, and resilience efforts along vulnerable coasts and river basins.
On the Djibouti side, Ambassador Ahmed Araita Ali, Secretary‑General of the Africa Sovereign Carbon Registry Foundation, traced a line from the tiny Red Sea state’s existing carbon framework to a broader African vision.
Djibouti has already implemented a pricing system for ships calling at its ports, requiring transparent reporting and payment for emissions in line with international standards, while channeling revenues into renewable energy, forest conservation, and coastal protection projects.
The idea now is to replicate and expand that model along the continent’s coasts and skies, turning port calls and overflights into triggers for sovereign climate contributions rather than mere waypoints in global supply chains.
Advocates say the numbers could be significant. An analysis associated with the Africa Sovereign Carbon Registry estimates that large seagoing ships emit about 40 million tonnes of carbon dioxide on voyages to and from African countries each year; at a hypothetical carbon tax of 100 dollars a tonne, that would generate nearly 4 billion dollars in new sovereign revenues.
Even a much lower starting price, the analysis notes, could yield hundreds of millions of dollars annually if more African states coordinated their rules and enforcement. For countries whose entire national climate budgets can be measured in tens of millions, the prospect of capturing a fraction of this flow is hard to ignore.
For coastal communities and workers in ports and airlines, the stakes are more concrete. New carbon‑pricing schemes could, over time, influence freight costs, ticket prices, and investment decisions in shipping and aviation, with knock‑on effects for jobs and trade.
If designed with local input, proponents argue, a share of the revenue could finance coastal‑protection works in places like Bagamoyo or Tadjoura, grid upgrades for new wind and solar plants, or training programs for young people in port cities shifting toward cleaner logistics and ship services.
If mishandled, though, the schemes risk being perceived as another levy imposed from above — opaque in its design, unclear in its benefits, and vulnerable to the same trust gaps that have dogged previous climate‑finance efforts.
The Dodoma initiative also resonates in other African corridors. In West Africa, where countries from Senegal to Ghana are exploring how to regulate offshore oil, gas, and new green‑hydrogen projects, officials are watching how Tanzania and Djibouti are trying to capture value from transit emissions without scaring off investment.
In Southern Africa, debates over regional carbon taxes and border adjustments have already begun, reflecting a broader willingness to treat climate policy as a lever of trade strategy rather than just environmental stewardship.
Policy Fault Lines
The Tanzania–Djibouti initiative touches several live debates in African climate policy. One is sovereignty. For years, African officials have complained that under mechanisms like the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism, most of the value chain, from project design to verification and trading, was controlled by intermediaries and companies based outside the continent.
By creating national registries and pricing systems linked directly to ports and airspace, countries like Djibouti and Tanzania are testing a different model, in which African institutions define the rules and capture a larger share of the resulting revenue.
The move does not reject global standards; it attempts to reframe who applies them and to whom they are accountable.
A second debate centers on coordination. At the Dodoma meeting, Ambassador Araita Ali spoke about the need for “a unified African carbon system that allows the continent to speak with one voice in global carbon markets,” a phrase that resonates with statements from the African Union and regional economic communities.
Advocates argue that without some harmonization on standards, pricing approaches, and benefit‑sharing, African countries could end up undercutting one another to attract limited investment or sign bilateral deals that lock in low prices for their mitigation efforts. The Tanzania–Djibouti talks hint at a building‑block strategy: start with a small coalition of willing states in transport, then widen the circle across coasts and corridors.
Skeptics note that “unity” is easier to invoke than to implement. Countries differ widely in emissions profiles, administrative capacity, and political priorities, and some, like South Africa, with its domestic carbon tax, are focused on internal reforms before engaging in complex cross‑border schemes.
Others, from Kenya to Côte d’Ivoire, are still cataloging their carbon‑project pipelines and clarifying who has authority over trading decisions. Building a continent‑wide architecture will require time, trust, and a level of technical coordination that few regional initiatives have yet achieved.
A third concern is integrity. Global carbon markets have come under intense scrutiny for credits that do not represent real emissions cuts or that fail to protect local communities and ecosystems.
The Africa Sovereign Carbon Registry and its backers say their model is designed to avoid those pitfalls, with transparent monitoring, reporting, and verification rules and an explicit link to each country’s nationally determined contribution under the Paris Agreement.
Whether they can maintain that standard as more actors and more complex transport emissions come under the system will be a key test, especially as watchdogs and civil society groups demand clearer evidence that each tonne counted reflects a real change on the ground.
For now, the Dodoma talks remain at an early stage, a framework under negotiation rather than a fully fledged system with binding rules. But they offer a glimpse of how Africa’s carbon‑market diplomacy is evolving: away from fragmented projects and toward strategic, sector‑based approaches anchored in national institutions and regional alliances.
In East Africa, the experiment could eventually align with port reforms in Kenya and Ethiopia; in Central and West Africa, it may intersect with efforts by Congo Basin states to monetize forest protection without ceding control to external brokers.
If Tanzania and Djibouti succeed in turning shipping and aviation emissions into a steady flow of climate revenue for African‑led projects, other states are likely to follow; if they stumble, the episode will be a cautionary tale about the complexity of marrying global markets, national sovereignty, and local needs.
In a world where trillions of dollars in climate investment are at stake, the quiet scene in a Dodoma conference room may turn out to be an early chapter in a larger story: how African governments decide to price their carbon, and, crucially, who gets to keep the proceeds.
