For generations, the Indigenous Samburu, Maasai, Borana and Rendille people of northern Kenya have been grazing cattle and other animals, following the rhythm of the rains and rules passed down from community elders.

But in 2013, a conservation organization run by a white, formerly colonial family thought it could do better. It set up a project to sell carbon offsets based on the idea that replacing the “unplanned” grazing methods of Kenya’s Indigenous communities with a more centralized approach closer to commercial ranching would actually store more carbon in the soil and help offset the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation responsible for the climate crisis. Now, a new report from Survival International backed by Indigenous Kenyans argues that the project is putting pastoralist culture and food security at risk, and likely isn’t offsetting emissions either.

“We have blown a whistle so the world can hear what they are doing,” Abdullahi Hajj Gonjobe of Kenya’s Borana people said in a video shared by Survival International. “The [international] funds they are sending to this place are destroying us, they are not helping us.”

Way Off Base

The report, “Blood Carbon: How a Carbon Offset Scheme Makes Millions From Indigenous Land in Northern Kenya,” focuses on a carbon offset project called the Northern Kenya Grassland Carbon Project. The project, which covers two million hectares of land home to more than 100,000 people, was started by conservation group the Northern Rangelands Trust (NRT), which calls it the “the world’s largest soil carbon removal project to date and the first project generating carbon credits reliant on modified livestock grazing practices.”

This is based on the assumption that the “planned rotational grazing” methods introduced by the NRT will foster more vegetation — and therefore store more carbon — than traditional methods, to the tune of around three-quarters of a tonne more carbon per hectare per year. Over one year, that would amount to 1.5 millions of tonnes of carbon stored; over 30 years, the project claims it would generate around 41 million net tonnes of carbon credits for $300 to $500 million.

The project was registered by Verra — the world’s top carbon credit certifier — as  Project #1468 and has generated at least 6.7 million credits between 2013 and Feb. 2023, 4.5 million of which have been purchased as offsets, including 180,000 by Netflix and 90,000 by Meta.

However, the report raises serious questions about whether any of that money actually accomplished anything. For example, the aim of the project is to increase vegetation, but NRT’s own maps for 2012 to 2020 show vegetation declining in 48.5 percent of the project area.

“[I]f, as the project asserts, vegetation cover is correlated with soil carbon, this would suggest that soil carbon in much of the area is in fact also declining,” the report author Simon Counsell wrote.

Read the full article about the Northern Kenya Grassland Carbon Project by Olivia Rosane at EcoWatch.