Earlier this month, I wrote about the conclusion of Verra’s two-year long carbon accounting review of the Kariba REDD project in Zimbabwe. Verra found that 15.2 million fake carbon credits were sold from the project.
Jaye Connolly left a comment following the post on REDD-Monitor. “I am the one that went out to Kariba to see how $30 million of community benefits were spent and I saw virtually nothing,” she wrote. “I’ve written a complete book on this.”
The book is titled, “Carbon Credits are Crap”. With a title like that, it didn’t take me long to buy the book and read it.
To say I was disappointed would be an understatement.
The first red flag came on the cover of the book. The subtitle reads, “The myths, the mess, and the way forward for traceable carbon credits.”
Connolly’s solution to the carbon credit “mess” is “the rise of technology-driven solutions” such as “real-time satellite imagery, advanced data analytics and AI-driven monitoring systems”. In addition, she suggests that “robust regulations” and meaningful standards” are needed. And carbon credits should be digitised and put on the blockchain.
“AI can be used to design and optimize carbon credit projects, ensuring they deliver the most significant impact,” Connolly writes. She doesn’t mention the massive energy and water consumption of the data centres needed for AI. Neither does she mention that AI frequently gets things completely wrong.
The problems with carbon credits are systemic and intractable and cannot be resolved with a techno-fixes and hoped for improvements in regulations and standards.
While I was reading Connolly’s book, a peer reviewed study titled “Are Carbon Offsets Fixable?” was published. The study is the “most comprehensive review of evidence on the effectiveness on carbon offsetting to date”. The authors answer the question about whether carbon offsets are fixable with a resounding “NO!”
Connolly’s trip to Kariba
Connolly travelled to Zimbabwe after reading Bart Crezee and Ties Gijzel’s January 2023 article about the Kariba REDD project for Follow the Money. That article revealed that more than €30 million should have gone to local communities.
“I embarked on a 15,000-kilometre journey to Zimbabwe,” Connolly writes, “to see firsthand what over €30 million in carbon credits looked like on the ground.”
She travelled to Mola, a village in Kariba district and met Champion Rare, the village chief. He reacted in “shock, disbelief and frustration” when Connolly told him about the money that local communities should have received.
“If we had €30 million, this place would look like New York City!” Chief Mola said. “We need the basics — education, clean water, jobs, food, fuel — and there is no internet around here.”
He added that the community had received some bags of seed and soil and a garden had been constructed. Connolly describes it as “sad-looking”. Here’s a photograph posted last week by Gijzel on LinkedIn:
The village had been promised water supply, a new school, and jobs. None of these appeared. “Where’s the money?” Chief Mola asked.
Connolly also met with Zimbabwean government officials. They appeared not to know anything about the money from the sale of carbon credits from the Kariba REDD project.
That is the best part of the book. Unfortunately that’s only a small part of the book. Connolly has little more to say about the spectacular failure of the Kariba REDD project.
The book does include brief overviews of the problems with the Northern Kenya Grassland Carbon Project, the overcrediting cookstove projects, including the criminal charges faced by Ken Newcombe, former CEO of C-Quest Capital, and Germany’s €4.5 billion carbon offset fraud.
Unfortunately, the book has nothing to say about the urgent need to leave fossil fuels in the ground. “Africa’s vast natural resources make it an ideal location for carbon offsetting projects,” Connolly writes. She apparently has not considered the fact that these carbon offsets will be used to legitimise continued burning of fossil fuels.
In 2020, oil company Total (now called TotalEnergies) claimed to have delivered “carbon neutral” fossil gas — a claim that was based on the company having bought offsets from the Kariba REDD project. Even Renat Heuberger, then-CEO of South Pole acknowledged that claims of carbon neutral fossil fuels are “such obvious nonsense”.
Astonishingly, Connolly highlights a World Bank Forest Carbon Partnership Facility project in Mozambique as an example of a REDD project “with local communities placed at the forefront of the decision-making process”.
Her source for this claim is a one-page summary of a six month, US$150,000 consultancy coordinated by a company called Nitidae. That consultancy took place in 2015, four years before the project started.
A 2024 report by the Public Integrity Center, an NGO in Mozambique, found that minimal benefits had reached local communities. Even a 2023 World Bank mission was critical — rating the project as “moderately unsatisfactory”.
Public Integrity Center concludes that the project “faces significant challenges, including increasing deforestation, slow administrative processes, and significant delays in disbursing funds to local communities”.
The Africa Voluntary Carbon Credits Market Forum
Connolly is chairman and CEO of a technology company called RippleNami, which focuses on Africa. The company is incorporated in the tax haven of Delaware.
She is also chair and founder of Caelum Resources. The company “was founded to create a profound and transparent impact on the carbon credit market,” Connolly writes. The company is incorporated in the tax have of Delaware.
When Connolly met Zimbabwean government officials after her visit to the Kariba REDD project, she had promised to “help to educate them on carbon credits and accelerate their participation in the climate economy”.
Connolly writes that,
This commitment led to the organization of the first Africa Voluntary Carbon Credits Market Forum, held in July 2023 in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, where I was invited to speak about the Kariba fraud.
The Africa Voluntary Carbon Market Forum that took place in July 2023 was the first and last such Forum. The Forum’s website has now disappeared.
Organised by the Africa Voluntary Carbon Credits Market and the government of Zimbabwe, the co-chair was Kathleen Delaney, the CEO of Caelum Resources.
One of the companies sponsoring the Forum was Invictus Energy Limited, an Australian oil and gas company which is using offsets from the Ngamo-Gwayi-Sikumi REDD project to greenwash its Cabora Bassa Basin oil and gas project in northern Zimbabwe. Connolly doesn’t mention this in her book.
Other sponsors of the Forum include Conservation International, EcoSecurities, Verra, Volkswagen, the Belarus African Foreign Trade Association, and C-Quest Capital.
Yes, that is the same C-Quest Capital whose CEO, Ken Newcombe, is facing criminal charges for massive over-issuance of carbon credits. Connolly doesn’t mention this in her book.
Jacob Zuma, the former president of South Africa, was representing Belarus at the Forum. During the Forum, he presented a cheque for 2 million emission reduction units on behalf of the Belarus African Foreign Trade Association. The carbon credits came from Russia, from a Siberian forestry programme. The credits were subsequently rejected by the Africa Voluntary Carbon Credits Market.
At the time REDD-Monitor wrote about this, the Africa Voluntary Carbon Credits Market’s website consisted of a message stating “Coming Soon”. It has now been deleted.
Needless to say, there is no mention of Jacob Zuma’s antics at the Africa Voluntary Carbon Credit Market Forum in Connolly’s book.
However, in the acknowledgements at the end of her book, she writes,
To the organizers of the Africa Voluntary Carbon Credits Market Forum event in Zimbabwe: you still owe me and my partners a lot of money for our expenses. Yet, this is another reminder of how the carbon credit market needs reform — on all fronts.
“Carbon markets do not need to be fixed,” Larry Lohmann pointed out in an interview five years ago. “They need to be eliminated.”
A book written in three days
In a podcast with the publishers of the book (LID Publishing) Connolly says she wrote the book in three days. I believe her. It reads exactly like a book that was written in three days.
“Corporations should champion projects that promote sustainable development, enhance biodiversity and genuinely improve the livelihoods of those on the ground,” Connolly writes. The book includes example after example of this sort of wishful thinking.
But Connolly’s book includes no analysis whatsoever of the root causes of corporate-led environmental and social destruction: extractivism, capitalism, colonialism, structural inequity, or neoliberalism.
Neither does Connolly consider genuine solutions to the climate crisis, which have to include leaving fossil fuels in the ground. Instead, she is encouraging the dangerous distraction of carbon markets that allow Big Polluters to continue business as usual.
Thanks for this Chris. I don’t see how anyone can write a book in three days unless they just plugged their info into an LLM and had it churn out the content. With so much of that happening now (I can’t tell you how many ‘editing’ jobs there are in Upwork paying people to ‘humanise’ AI written manuscripts - I won’t do it because it’s so boring), it’s driving expectations around writing down and down. Thanks for a well written article!
That's actually scary. I watched Connolly's Ted talk presentation posted under comments and thought she has good things to offer, especially the part with community impacts and unequal benefit sharing. But now it seems like that's nothing more than glorifying her business under the same logic of profiting from the climate crisis. AI and block chains for offset integrity? Come on...