Why Did Verra Reinstate the Northern Kenya Rangelands Soil Carbon Project Despite Human Rights and Legal Concerns?

By Taremwa Diana Karakire

Following Verra's decision to re-certify the Northern Kenya Rangelands soil  Carbon Project despite an Isiolo court ruling raising questions over the legal basis of some participating conservancies. I revisited an interview I conducted with climate justice and carbon markets expert Adrien Tofighi-Niaki www.aniaki.work in March. In this conversation, he explains what the case means for carbon markets, rights of Indigenous peoples and the future of carbon offsetting in Africa.

Q: What are your main concerns about the Northern Kenya Rangelands Carbon Project, and more broadly the rapid expansion of large-scale carbon offset projects across Africa?

A: This project is a classic example of how the voluntary carbon market continues to fail people and planet. What makes this case particularly alarming is not just the Isiolo court ruling itself, but what it reveals about the overall certification process in the voluntary carbon market. Despite the fact that some of these conservancies lacked a clear legal basis and could not therefore "own" or "transfer" carbon credits to NRT, the project was still validated and approved under Verra's carbon certification system, and even went through two verifications.

It took over four years and over 150 members from various affected communities to prove to the world what was clearly an illegitimate project generating illegitimate credits on the global market.

There are over 2,500 carbon credit projects registered in Africa, and over 600 of these belong to Verra, including in Kenya, Mozambique, Botswana, South Africa, Malawi, Tanzania, Zambia, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, among others. Indigenous peoples and local communities have enough to deal with from the cumulative impacts of environmental, climatic, socio-economic and geopolitical changes. A market that not only depends on these peoples’ livelihoods and lands to “save our planet” and now also depends on their due diligence to report wrongdoing and human rights abuses, is not only a lazy market but an incredibly problematic one.

Q: The project reportedly generated millions of dollars in carbon credits. What does this case reveal about the integrity of voluntary carbon markets, particularly in rangeland ecosystems and what does this mean for the future of similar carbon schemes?

There have now been countless examples of carbon offset projects generating millions of dollars in carbon credits despite having zero positive impact on mitigating climate change. This project is just another example of a mechanism that has failed frontline communities and global climate objectives repeatedly.

Rangelands cover roughly half of the world’s land area. These are not only unique ecosystems in terms of biodiversity, they are massive territories that support the livelihoods of millions of pastoralist peoples worldwide, including in Kenya. The case of the Northern Kenya Grassland Carbon Project is layered with various problems. The first being additionality, which asks a simple questions: would the carbon-related benefits from this project have happened anyway? In this case, the answer was overwhelmingly yes, as Indigenous peoples and pastoralists were already managing the land sustainably, meaning the carbon offset project's core foundation collapses before it even begins.

Further issues such as questionable baseline scenarios, to the lack of proper legal procedures from the conservancies, and overlooking Free, Prior and Informed Consent, all point to a structurally flawed system.

This ruling matters a lot because the NRT model, which was to establish conservancies on Indigenous land without adequate consent, monetising the so-called improved carbon outcomes, and selling the credits to Western corporations, is not a unique scenario. This is a template for generating profit that has been replicated across Africa and elsewhere, and today communities that are subject to similar projects elsewhere now have a legal precedent to refer to thanks to the Isiolo court ruling.

Q: Critics say the project disrupted traditional grazing systems. What accountability mechanisms currently exist for communities who say their land rights were undermined, and are they adequate?

A:That Verra was made aware of these serious concerns and failed to act on them is not a one-off failure. This is a clear pattern that can be seen across other projects (e.g. Southern Cardamom REDD+ Project, Kariba REDD+ Project). So the fact that warnings were raised and ignored suggests that accountability plays little more than a nominal role in the VCM, and is, for the most part, a performative feature.

Q: Do you see systemic risks that carbon finance can incentivize land control or conservation models that exclude Indigenous and pastoralist governance systems?

Absolutely. Carbon credits derived from land that was illegally enclosed are not legitimate credits. In addition to the reported human rights violations that occurred with the project, the fact that Verra has allowed the project to continue, and carried on collecting its commissions on the sale of NRT's carbon credits delegitimizes the entire VCM more than it already was. Indeed, the systemic risks involved are enormous, as such a system can incentivize land control or conservation models that exclude Indigenous and pastoralist governance systems as well as aggravate their struggle against environmental and climate change.

Q:Among developers, certifiers, investors, and government agencies, who bears the greatest responsibility for the harms alleged and what reforms are needed to ensure corporations cannot profit from projects that violate human rights ?

To begin, the voluntary carbon market is built on a flawed premise, which is that the right to pollute can be purchased, and that this purchase can be verified or quantified by the very same people generating profit from it. Every accountability failure that follows, from rubber-stamping projects to auditing, flows from that original flaw. Bad rules do not emerge despite a sound system. They emerge because the system was designed around profit, not protection.

This is not simply a matter of bad actors, it is a matter of a bad concept with bad rules. So, we cannot expect developers, government agencies, or corporate buyers to act in good faith when the standards they are following were designed without adequate protections in the first place.

The deepest dysfunction in the VCM lies in the fact that verification bodies both set the standards and profit from approving projects against them. This creates an incredibly perverse incentive: the higher the bar for project approval, the less revenue flows in. The result of course is a system where the entities entrusted with mitigating climate change or protecting communities actually have the least financial motivation to do so.

This means it will always be up to journalists, researchers, communities, activists and civil society to do the due diligence work that these entities are paid to do. If that’s the best that the voluntary carbon market can come up with after over 25 years of developments and reforms, perhaps it’s time we stop spending so much effort and money on a mechanism that is not only contributing to human rights violations but also repeatedly deemed useless in terms of its climate benefits in the overwhelming majority of cases.