15.2 million fake carbon credits were sold from the Kariba REDD project according to Verra

Almost two years after suspending the project, Verra has completed its carbon accounting review. The quality control review is still ongoing.

Almost two years after starting an investigation of the Kariba REDD project in Zimbabwe, Verra has completed an “in-depth review of the carbon accounting” of the project.

Verra suspended the Kariba REDD project not as the result of an audit of the project, but because of a brilliant piece of investigative reporting by Heidi Blake published in the New Yorker. Blake’s article followed a series of exposés by Bart Crezee and Ties Gijzel for Follow the Money. This was followed by investigative reporting by Tin Fischer in Die Zeit, Julian Schmidli for SRF, and by Gijzel for Follow the Money. Verra ignored everything until the New Yorker article.

In January 2023, Crezee and Gijzel wrote that, “the amount of avoided carbon emissions turned out to be inaccurate”. Carbon trading firm South Pole had sold about €100 million worth of carbon credits from Kariba since the project started in 2011.

Follow the Money obtained satellite data collected by South Pole based on which the company estimated that 27 million of Kariba’s carbon credits were fake.

This is a result of the conflict of interest at the heart of all REDD and other carbon projects. Project developers have an interest in generating as many carbon credits as possible. Verra earns money from a commission on issued carbon credits. Auditors are paid by the project developer and have an interest in not raising too many questions and developing a reputation for being too strict. South Pole wrote the project’s baseline and helped create the millions of junk credits — and profited from the sale of those credits.

15 million fake credits

When Verra suspended the project in October 2023, it had generated almost 42 million carbon credits. Of these, 26,822,953 had been sold. And just over 10 million are unsold. Verra will remove these from its registry — they will never be sold.

Verra estimates the number of “excess credits” to be 15,220,520.

That’s more than 15 million fake carbon credits. But Verra provides no explanation why its number of fake credits is so much lower than South Pole’s estimate.

Of the fake credits, 10,321,531 have been retired and 4,898,989 are “active” carbon credits.

Under Verra’s system, if a project is found to have overestimated the number carbon credits generated this is corrected in future monitoring periods. But Carbon Green Investments, the project developer, withdrew the Kariba REDD project from Verra’s registry.

Another option could be the “buffer pool”. Verra requires project proponents to put some credits aside in a buffer pool as a sort of insurance against the forest being destroyed.

The Kariba REDD project put just over 5 million credits into the buffer pool. Verra has cancelled these credits.

Verra could cancel enough carbon credits from its remaining buffer pool (from all its other projects) to cover the more than 15 million fake carbon credits. In October 2023, Bloomberg reported Verra as saying that it would dip into its buffer pool — which could wipe out somewhere between 38% and 51% of its buffer pool.

However, Verra is not planning to use its buffer pool.

Instead Verra will “request compensation for the 15,220,520 excess credits” from Carbon Green Investments, the project proponent. Verra will ask CGI to buy carbon credits from other projects and cancel them.

This allows Verra to claim that, “The status of retired VCUs [Verified Carbon Units — i.e. carbon credits] will not change and will remain valid in the Verra Registry.” But this is only true if Carbon Green Investments buys enough carbon credits.

And that seems unlikely.

In a letter to Verra dated 25 September 2025, Carbon Green Investments notes that Verra issued the carbon credits, not the project developer:

The Kariba REDD+ credits have all been issued after five separate audits over the period, and we are not sure why Verra did not pick up any anomaly on the project then.

Carbon Green Investments has also requested that Verra provides the baseline assessment report and data sources that it used for the Kariba project review. Carbon Green Investments wrote,

While we appreciate the update on the carbon accounting and quality control processes, we are concerned by the lack of accompanying detail regards the basis for the reported findings.

Carbon Green Investments asked for a freeze on the compensation process and asked Verra not to contact its clients without the company’s consent.

Verra will also contact the account holders of the remaining 4,898,989 active carbon credits and “invite them to voluntarily cancel those credits”.

In October 2023, having made a small fortune from the Kariba REDD project, South Pole pulled out of project. A few weeks later, Renat Heuberger, South Pole’s CEO resigned. South Pole has now asked Verra to cancel the 2.5 million Kariba REDD credits that South Pole still holds.

South Pole argues that cancelling these credits will “help address the discrepancies in issued credits and uphold the environment integrity of the project”. Cancelling credits that should never have existed in the first place is obviously the right thing to do. But the junk carbon credits from the Kariba REDD project were in any case worthless. Who on earth would buy them? And the Kariba REDD project does not have any “environmental integrity” to uphold.

Quality control review

Meanwhile, after almost two years, Verra has “identified certain topics it needs the VVBs [Validation/Verification Bodies] of the Kariba project to address further to bring the review to a close” — here are the topics, followed by REDD-Monitor’s comments:

• Conducting trophy-hunting activities within the project area and the question of whether this violates any required safeguards

On 16 October 2023, the day before Verra announced the suspension of the Kariba REDD project, journalist Ties Gijzel wrote an article for Follow the Money revealing that a company called Charlton McCallum Safaris was operating on land that overlapped with the Kariba REDD project. Steve Wentzel, the owner of Carbon Green Investments, is running a two-tiered operation, Gijzel wrote. “In addition to selling carbon credits, he also profits from trophy hunting in his nature reserve.”

Heidi Blake of the New Yorker asked Wentzel about trophy hunting and he acknowledged that it happens across the project area.

“It is unlikely that projects engaging in trophy hunting activities would meet the rules and requirements of Verra’s programs,” Verra stated.

While Wentzel was profiting from trophy hunting inside the REDD project area, brutal anti-poaching operations associated with the project targetted local communities. Journalists Tin Fischer and Farai Shawn Matiashe wrote about this for Die Zeit in July 2023.

A documentary film called “Trophy” includes footage of the anti-poaching operations. South Pole documented the number of people arrested for poaching in its reports about Kariba. Verra doesn’t appear concerned about the human rights abuses against people living in the project area.

• The traceability of project funds, including how revenues from the sale of carbon credits have been allocated and documented

Steve Wentzel admitted to Heidi Blake that there was “no paper trail” for the money in the project. Wentzel incorporated Carbon Green Investments in the tax and secrecy haven of Guernsey. He developed a way of moving money that was untraceable. “It was illegal,” he told Blake.

In 2022, South Pole’s head of corporate investment, Dirk Muench, carried out a due diligence process on Carbon Green Investments. He concluded, after a long investigation, that most of the money from the sale of carbon credits from the Kariba REDD project had “gone astray”.

• The transparency and governance of benefit-sharing arrangements with local communities

In 2014, Jeffrey Gogo a journalist with the Zimbabwean newspaper, The Herald, reported on a Transparency International workshop about REDD in Harare. Elmon Mudenda, a councillor in Binga Ward 4, told the workshop that there was an “outcry” in Binga District about the project and Carbon Green International’s local subsidiary Carbon Green Africa (CGA):

“We have not seen anything really tangible, financially or otherwise (from CGA). We do not understand what REDD+ is all about. My officers told me ‘Carbon Green Africa is there to take pictures.’”

REDD-Monitor wrote about this in February 2018, along with a strange plan to sell crypto tokens from the Kariba project — because sales of carbon credits were so slow.

In March 2024, Patrick Greenfield and Nyasha Chingono wrote an article in The Guardian that reveals that “Only a fraction of the €100m has been distributed to the villages within the project.” A villager told The Guardian that “The community is complaining because they are not seeing the money trickle down.”

The auditors have 90 days to respond. All of these problems were explored in detail in investigative reports published in 2023. Why it took almost two years for Verra to send these allegations to the auditors is anyone’s guess.