Court upholds ban on Northern Rangelands Trust’s Blood Carbon operations in Isiolo, Kenya
Two of the organisation’s largest wildlife conservancies are unconstitutional.
The Northern Rangelands Trust is running what it describes as “the world’s largest soil carbon removal project”. The project, called the Northern Kenya Grassland Carbon project, suffered a major blow in January 2025 when the Isiolo Environment and Land Court ruled that two of NRT’s largest wildlife conservancies had been established unconstitutionally.
The case was filed in September 2021 by 165 community members. The three judges, Oscar Amugo Angote, Charles Kimutai Yano, and Christopher Kyania Nzili ruled that the wildlife conservancies had been established on unregistered community land without proper consultation, without the consent of the people living there, and in violation of constitutional principles on land rights.
The court issued a permanent injunction that prohibits NRT and its partners from conducting any conservancy operations, including the deployment of rangers in the two of NRT’s conservancies, Cherab Conservancy and Biliqo Bulesa Conservancy in Isiolo County.
NRT’s rangers have been accused of serious human rights abuses. In the case against NRT, the community members accused NRT of taking,
extreme measures including arming rangers whose presence in the county elicits tension; that there have been several instances of violence, loss of life, and forceful disappearances . . .
On 1 April 2025, the three judges, Angote, Yano, and Nzili, dismissed NRT’s effort to overturn the ruling. “The plea for stay of execution is not merited,” the judges ruled.
In the January 2025 ruling, The Standard reports,
The judges further directed Isiolo County Government to work with the Ministry of Lands to facilitate proper registration of the community land under the Community Land Act, 2016.1
In addition to the violence, loss of life, and forceful disappearances at the hands of armed rangers, communities complained that Abdi Jarso, the chair of the Cherab Community Conservancy, and Golicha Jarso, the chair of the Bulesa Biliqo Conservancy are supposed to represent the community. The case against NRT describes this as a “blatant misrepresentation” because the communities “have not publicly participated nor had any dealings in and over the community land”.
A long simmering crisis
In a 2019 article, Abdullahi Boru Halakhe of Refugees International, writes about Kenya’s development plan, “Vision 2030”, and the dangers that it raises in Isiolo:
Isiolo’s potential, if not judiciously managed, could turn the county into the future axis of natural resource-based conflict, especially in the large-scale irregularly acquired land by private corporations and individuals under the guise of community wildlife conservation.
Halakhe highlights the risks associated with the conservation model in Kenya:
In the current wildlife private conservation paradigm – underwritten by well-heeled intergenerational wildlife conservation untouchable “royals” and marketed by a well-choreographed sleek PR machine – pastoralist communities who have lived in harmony with wildlife for generations are only used as worn-out tropes of the Messiah Complex. Kuki Gallmann, whose life is immortalised in the movie I Dreamed of Africa is cast as a noble White Saviour, keeping the wildlife and pastoralists safe.
And he writes about the role of NRT in creating wildlife conservancies:
According to NRT, conservancies are community-led wildlife conservation initiatives that provide a win-win situation for wildlife conservation and for pastoralists. The lack of transparency and adequate information regarding the manner in which these conservancies are established and managed adds to the anxiety of pastoralist communities. Pastoralists in the area have been victims of various land grabs in the past and therefore view conservancies as a Trojan horse that will lead to further annexation of their pastoral rangelands.
Fortress conservation
The problems with NRT’s model of fortress conservation are well documented. In 2021, the Oakland Institute published a report titled, “Stealth Game: ‘Community’ conservancies devastate land and lives in Northern Kenya”. The report documents in detail how NRT’s anti-poaching mobile units “face allegations of extrajudicial killings and disappearances, among other abuses”.
Interviews with local community members by the Oakland Institute revealed that 11 people had been killed “in circumstances involving the conservation body [NRT]”.
The Oakland Institute writes that,
NRT, in collaboration with big environmental organizations, epitomizes a Western-led approach to conservation that creates a profitable business but marginalizes local communities who have lived on these lands for centuries. Despite its claims to the contrary, NRT is yet another example of how fortress conservation, under the veneer of ‘community-based conservation,’ is dispossessing the very pastoralist communities it claims to be helping – destroying their traditional movements, their autonomy, and their lives.
Blood carbon
In 2023, Survival International published a report about the Northern Kenya Grassland Carbon project. The report launched Survival International’s campaign “Blood carbon”.
The report raised serious questions about the credibility of the carbon offsets generated by the Northern Kenya Grassland Carbon project as well as documenting the human rights abuses caused by the project’s fortress conservation model.
The report concludes that,
The project claims that “Companies that invest in the Northern Kenya Rangelands Carbon Project can help meet their carbon neutral and climate positive targets while fulfilling shareholder and customer demands for meaningful and quantifiable results and impact in ways that are transparent and accountable.” The reality is that the project is far from transparent and accountable, does not demonstrate any meaningful quantifiable results, and cannot guarantee climate neutrality or progress towards climate positive targets. NRT itself admitted that the project was a “Beta test” of the grasslands carbon methodology. It should now conclude that, in many key respects, it is not succeeding, and probably cannot succeed in terms of a verified carbon project.
Verra’s whitewash review
In March 2023, the Washington DC-based carbon certifying organisation, Verra, suspended NRT’s soil carbon project as a result of Survival International’s investigation. Verra started a “quality control review” and until the review was completed, no carbon credits could be sold from the project.
The review was completed in November 2023. Survival International called the review a “shocking whitewash”.
Instead of investigating the problems with the design and validation of the project, Verra’s review focused on the most recent audit, which was carried out in 2022 by Ruby Canyon Environmental.
The review failed to address any of the problems raised in Survival International’s report.
In a statement about the review, Survival International points out that,
the most critical issues concerning the additionality of the project, evident serious problems with carbon leakage, highly questionable baseline scenarios, impermanence of the claimed soil carbon storage, inability of the project to control the project boundaries, structural flaws in the monitoring methodology and the use of worthless monitoring data, clear non-compliance with the methodology under which the project was developed, the lack of a proper legal basis for the project when it was established, as well as self-evident absence of proper consultation with, or Free Prior and Informed Consent from, the area’s many indigenous inhabitants – have simply not been addressed in the review.
And despite the court’s ruling in January 2025 that two of the largest of NRT’s wildlife conservancies were established unconstitutionally, a ruling that has now been upheld, in April 2025, Verra has taken no action whatsoever against NRT. The Northern Kenya Grassland Carbon project remains on Verra’s registry.
Since Verra completed its whitewash review in November 2023, the project has sold more than 1.5 million carbon credits. Junk carbon credits.
The Standard’s website takes us to a completely different article. REDD-Monitor is grateful to a colleague who sent a scan of the article.
"irregularly acquired land by private corporations and individuals under the guise of community wildlife conservation." (Abdullahi Boru Kalakhe article)
- That represents a clever new method of land-grabbing or enclosure of the Commons.
"dispossessing the very pastoralist communities it claims to be helping – destroying their traditional movements, their autonomy, and their lives." (Oakland Institute)
- Destroying the lives of people who actually know how to live is absolutely unforgiveable.
That is wonderful that the courts have upheld the decision against Northern Rangelands. That's a win. But bigger wins may be on the horizon - the plot by governments to hand over environmental regulation to Market signals, thinking that they could tap into this imaginary wealth of big business to fund environmental remediation, could soon collapse in the coming wave of illiquidity stripping away massive amounts of leveraged "wealth." And the better news is that degrowth is good for the planet.