“Are they buying our air?” asked Matito Leriso. We were sitting in the one-room shelter Matito built for her family in Northern Kenya. Matito is a mother, a grandmother, and an elected member of her community’s land management committee. She was asking about the world’s largest soil-based carbon project, which covers 4.5 million acres and is run by an organisation called the Northern Rangelands Trust.
Carbon is an unusual trade. Companies like Netflix, Meta, and Salesforce pay Northern Rangelands Trust because the Trust has worked with pastoralists like Matito to take better care of their grazing lands and, as a result, the soil in northern Kenya is absorbing more of the carbon that is causing the planet to warm.
Matito has reason to question the transaction. Although the project has been around for a decade, Northern Rangelands Trust did not provide communities with access to the legal agreement that governs the project until late last year. And to date, the Trust has refused to disclose how much revenue it has received from the sale of carbon credits. Criticising the lack of transparency, Matito said, “If I allow you to sell my cow at the market, you need to tell me how much you sold it for.”
Matito is intimately familiar with climate change. She just lived through Kenya’s worst drought in 40 years. Before the drought began, her family had 300 cows. Many of those cows died of starvation, and some were stolen by members of a neighboring tribe. When we sat in her home last year, only five remained. Matito’s household was running low on food, and she was unsure if she could keep her youngest son in secondary school.
Carbon projects are meant to be a climate solution, but they’re facing a crisis of confidence for two reasons. First, the projects could serve as a dangerous excuse for rich countries to keep polluting. UN Secretary General Anthony Gutierez warned against “dubious offsets” late last year, and a UN task force is set to emphasise this point.
Second, carbon projects could be new pills containing an old poison: land grabs. Zimbabwe, for example, announced last year it was signing over 20 per cent of its land mass to a Dubai-based company called Blue Carbon. No one offered a map, or specified which 20 per cent, and there’s no fifth of Zimbabwe that’s unoccupied. When a deal starts that way, communities are likely to be exploited, or worse, displaced.
These two concerns probably caused a 61 per cent reduction in the size of the carbon market last year. Despite those concerns, however, many communities welcome carbon projects as a possible alternative to a common devil’s bargain, in which you are promised jobs and “development” from a mine, say, or a mono-crop mega-plantation, but in exchange the place where you live is destroyed. Carbon projects could be a way of placing economic value on the work of stewarding nature.
Members of the Grassroots Justice Network, which comprises legal empowerment groups from over 150 countries, have aligned around six principles that are necessary to make carbon projects fair. The first of these is the point Secretary General Gutierrez and his task force are making: carbon projects must supplement, not substitute for, reductions in emissions by rich countries. Otherwise we’re all doomed, and the people most vulnerable to climate change will suffer the most.
The other five principles focus on the people who live where the projects take place. No carbon project should happen without the free, prior, informed consent of the communities whose land is in question. Instead of displacing those people, carbon projects should harness their leadership as land stewards, and compensate them with at least 50 per cent of the revenue.
Kenya has an opportunity to bring these principles to life. The 27 pastoralist communities who host the Northern Rangelands Trust project have been clear: they welcome the project. Communities have received meaningful payments, which they have used to improve water infrastructure, fund scholarships, and build roads. An independent audit verified that the community grazing plans developed under the project have led to greater carbon storage in the soil, likely due to better grass cover. That means less carbon in the atmosphere. It also means more food for the animals on which the pastoralists of northern Kenya depend.
But Matito and her peers want the project on terms they understand and agree to. Kenya adopted regulations in May that require carbon project proponents to obtain the consent of the people whose land is in question. Northern Rangelands Trust has conceded that it needs to negotiate a new agreement with communities.
A fair deal is both possible and necessary. Carbon projects, like cows, ultimately depend on people. Unless national governments and standard-setting bodies adopt and enforce fundamental principles of carbon justice, the whole carbon enterprise will fail.
Vivek Maru is founder and CEO of the legal empowerment organisation Namati. Namati convenes the Grassroots Justice Network.
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Carbon projects were meant to be a climate solution, but they’re facing a crisis of confidence