Crooked Carbon Business: Trees for Global Benefits in Uganda
Carbon credits for rich countries. Hunger for Ugandan farmers.
This week’s briefing by Simon Counsell and Jutta Kill looks at the Trees for Global Benefits carbon project in Uganda.1 The briefing can be downloaded here:
Trees for Global Benefits is a tree planting project in Uganda that started in 2003. It is run by the NGO Ecotrust (Environmental Conservation Trust of Uganda).
On its website, Ecotrust claims that Trees for Global Benefits is “is a long-running cooperative carbon offsetting scheme in Uganda which combines community-led activities to increase carbon sequestration, encourage sustainable land-use practices, and provide farmers with performance-based payments.”
But a series of investigations into the Trees for Global Benefits reveals that the project is resulting in serious problems for the farmers involved.
Criticisms of the project
In 2017, Elina Andersson, researchers at Lund University and Wim Carton, Associate Professor of Sustainability Science at Lund University, wrote a book chapter about Trees for Global Benefits. Andersson and Carton interviewed 56 farmers in Mitooma district in southwestern Uganda where the project was first launched.
They found that “there is widespread confusion among the farmers about what the project is fundamentally about”. Farmers did not know what they are selling and to whom. “People know that they are selling carbon, but they don’t know what carbon is,” one farmer told them. “Some people are asking: how can you sell to someone you don’t know?”
Another farmer told Anderssen and Carton that,
“These trees are not easy to maintain. A farmer plants 300 trees, and 100 die. So when he is monitored, he is not paid. So you find people opting out. For me, now, I think I would do eucalyptus.”
In 2019, the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter reported on the Trees for Global Benefits project. There is no guarantee that the carbon will remain stored in the project’s trees. If farmers face economic difficulties, or if there is an illness in the family, they may be forced to cut down trees early to get money quickly.
There is no plan for replanting trees that are cut down. Farmers can earn more by planting coffee or sugarcane than planting trees.
In 2022, Global Forest Coalition published a report about the Trees for Global Benefits project. The researchers spoke to more than 100 community members:
The clear message from all communities was that the project was not delivering its promised benefits, and participants were growing increasingly bitter and desperate.
The lead author of the report was David Kureeba, a programme officer with Friends of the Earth Uganda. Farmers raised “serious concerns about food security, economic hardship, and other negative impacts”.
In 2024, a report by the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet exposed the inequity of the Trees for Global Benefits project, under the headline “Hunger forests”. Aftonbladet found that some of the farmers in the project were cutting down the trees to make them into charcoal. The farmers faced starvation because the trees were planted on their farmland.
Payments to farmers were delayed and not enough to replace the food that would have been grown on farmers’ land. One farmer had to work as a day labourer on other people’s farms. “My children have no food,” she told Aftonbladet.
In 2025, the BBC’s File on 4 reported on the project in Uganda, under the headline “The Carbon Offset Trap”. The BBC’s journalists found serious problems with the project and with the auditing of the amount of carbon stored in the tree planted under the project.
The BBC spoke to investigative journalist Luke Barratt of SourceMaterial. Barratt noted that the 2019 verification report highlights problems that were already in the 2009 verification report. “In particular, in the 2019 report I think it’s pretty surprising that even though it had been raised in previous audits, the land is not being properly or consistently measured,” Barratt points out. “If you’re not doing that then you’re not really going to be able to properly measure the carbon impact of your project. I think that’s pretty worrying.”
Counsell and Kill write that in October 2024, carbon offset rating agency BeZero downgraded its rating for the Trees for Global Benefits project to “BBB”. That indicates that the project has only a “moderate likelihood of achieving 1 tonne of CO₂e removal from the atmosphere”.
Also in 2025, World Rainforest Movement put out a video opposing REDD and carbon markets. The video includes a farmer who cut down the trees she’d planted under the Ecotrust project. She says that,
“It got to a point where I could not guarantee that I could provide food for my children through the planting of those trees. So I decided to cut down the trees and plant banana trees, as you can see in the background. When I cut down the trees and started growing food, they began to threaten me, calling me on the phone in the afternoon and at night.”
Payments for 10 years. Contracts for 15 to 25 years
Ecotrust claims to have signed up 41,000 farmers to the tree planting project. According to Ecotrust, an area of 27,297 hectares is covered under Trees for Global Benefits contracts.
The tree planting is taking place in four regions in Uganda, including the following in and around the following national parks: Murchison Falls, Queen Elizabeth, Mount Elgon, and the Rwenzori Mountains, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The project is certified by Plan Vivo, a UK-based carbon certification scheme.
The carbon credits from the Trees for Global Benefits project are sold “ex-ante”. The carbon credits do not correspond to actual reductions in carbon dioxide, but to hoped for reductions in the future.
The Trees for Global Benefits project has issued almost 6 million ex-ante carbon credits for trees planted since 2003. The largest buyers include myclimate, a Swiss carbon offset broker, and Max Burgers, a Swedish fast food chain.
Before farmers receive payments, Ecotrust assesses whether they have met the “performance milestones” in the contract. Ecotrust organises the monitoring and auditing required under the Plan Vivo scheme. And Ecotrust manages the “Community Carbon Fund”, a buffer pool into which each participant pays 10% of the money they receive from Ecotrust.
The contracts signed with Ecotrust were written in English, which few of the farmers speak. Under the contracts, farmers are responsible for looking after the trees for 15 to 25 years. If trees die of drought or disease, farmers receive no compensation. While payments stop after 10 years, farmers are contractually obliged to maintain the trees until the contract ends.
Ecotrust’s 2022 Annual Report states that of 235 farmers that signed contracts more than 10 years ago, 32% no longer maintained their trees.
The Trees for Global Benefits undergoes third-party verification audits every five years. If the audit finds that the project has issued too many carbon credits then Ecotrust uses farmer payments into the Community Carbon Fund to replace the shortfall. Rainforest Alliance and Environmental Services, Inc have carried out audits of the project.
According to Ecotrust’s 2023 annual report, Aster Global carried out a verification audit for the period January 2018 to December 2022. But the report is still not available on Plan Vivo’s project page.
Ecotrust’s executive director Pauline Nantongo Kalunda is on Plan Vivo’s Board of Trustees which oversees the Plan Vivo standard. That’s the carbon standard that Ecotrust uses to generate the carbon credits from the Trees for Global Benefits project. “A clear conflict of interest,” as Counsell and Kill note.
East African Crude Oil Pipeline
The East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) is a US$4 billion oil pipeline project. The 1,400-kilometre long pipeline is being constructed across Uganda and Tanzania. The project will involve drilling hundreds of oil wells in and around nature reserves. TotalEnergies is drilling for oil in the Murchison Falls National Park.
Counsell and Kill write that,
Neither TGB project documents on the Plan Vivo website nor the third-party verification reports discuss how evictions and the associated loss of tree planting sites may affect the TGB programme and in particular, its ‘Community Carbon Fund’, the TGB ‘buffer pool’.
This is despite the fact that tree planting sites in Hoima district and elsewhere are likely to be affected by future evictions of farmers to make way for the pipeline and related infrastructure.
Almost 250,000 barrels of oil are expected to flow through the pipeline every day once it is complete, which will result in emissions way in excess of the 6 million carbon credits generated by the Trees for Global Benefits project.
This is the tenth in a collection of posts on REDD-Monitor under the headline “Crooked Carbon Business”. The posts are based on a series of briefings about carbon offset projects written by Simon Counsell and Jutta Kill.
This 'community buffer pool' thing is just insane. Making up for the discrepancy made by the developer using community payment... It's like, other than all the colonial practices, they still manage to form a mechanism to rip the minimal benefits off the local.
Why conflate the pipeline capacity with the carbon credits? The land-use impacts, sure. But they are otherwise unfortunate correlations, no causality.