Guest Post: Carbon Credits, Conservancies and the Lie We Were Sold
“The Big Conservation Lie” revisited.
Mokua Manyara is a Kenyan lawyer, with the firm MNW Law. He recently wrote an article about carbon credits and conservation in Kenya. He starts with the book “The Big Conservation Lie: The Untold Story of Wildlife Conservation in Kenya” by John Mbaria and Mordecai Ogada.
The book raises serious questions about the way conservation has been carried out in Kenya and in the rest of Africa. I wrote a review of the book in 2017, not long after it was published.
From there, Manyara moves on to carbon trading and the Northern Kenya Grassland Carbon project, run by the Northern Rangelands Trust. Verra has suspended this project twice and it is currently listed as “On hold” on Verra’s registry.
Manyara draws parallels between fortress conservation and carbon trading. “Reading Mbaria and Ogada in 2026 is to read prophecy,” he writes.
Where they spoke of fortress conservation, philanthrocapitalism and the captured Kenyan elite, we now confront the same architecture rewired for a new commodity: carbon. The instrument has changed. The grammar is identical.
Manyara concludes his article with six conditions for implementing carbon projects so that they are not in breach of community rights.
Unfortunately, Manyara does not consider the fact that carbon trading exacerbates the climate crisis, by legitimising the continued extraction and burning of fossil fuels.
Manyara’s article is posted here in full, with his permission.
Carbon Credits, Conservancies and the Lie We Were Sold
By Mokua Manyara, MNW Weekly, 5 May 2026
There is a peculiar elegance in the way the carbon economy has dressed itself for African audiences. It arrives in the language of climate justice, indigenous empowerment and community development. It speaks of partnership, stewardship and shared prosperity. And then, when the cameras turn away and the project documents are filed in distant boardrooms, it does what every extractive economy before it has done. It takes the land. It takes the labour. It takes the story.
Almost a decade ago, John Mbaria and Mordecai Ogada published a slim, searing volume titled The Big Conservation Lie: The Untold Story of Wildlife Conservation in Kenya. Their central thesis was uncomfortable, and remains so. The conservation industry in Kenya, they wrote, is “thoroughly intertwined with colonialism, virulent racism, deliberate exclusion of the natives, veiled bribery, unsurpassed deceit, a conservation cult subscribed to by huge numbers of people in the West, and severe exploitation of the same wilderness conservationists have constantly claimed they are out to preserve.” The book did not invent that critique. It crystallised it.
Reading Mbaria and Ogada in 2026 is to read prophecy. Where they spoke of fortress conservation, philanthrocapitalism and the captured Kenyan elite, we now confront the same architecture rewired for a new commodity: carbon. The instrument has changed. The grammar is identical.
Consider the largest soil carbon project in the world. The Northern Kenya Rangelands Carbon Project, run by the Northern Rangelands Trust (NRT), spans more than 1.9 million hectares of pastoralist land in Samburu, Isiolo, Laikipia and Marsabit. It promises to remove some 50 million tonnes of carbon dioxide over thirty years. Its credits have been bought by Meta, Netflix, British Airways, NatWest and other corporations seeking to neutralise their emissions on paper while continuing to emit them in fact. The story sold to the global market is one of community: indigenous herders, ancestral grasslands, voluntary participation and equitable benefit. The story lived on the ground is colder.
In March 2023 the indigenous rights organisation Survival International published Blood Carbon, a forensic report concluding that the project had been validated on flawed methodology, that long-standing pastoralist grazing systems had been disrupted in the name of carbon sequestration and that the free, prior and informed consent required of any such intervention had not been obtained from the affected communities. Verra, the world’s leading voluntary carbon standard, suspended issuance of credits while it reviewed the project. Eight months later, Verra reinstated it. The fundamental concerns remained. The cash continued to flow.
Then came the courts.
In Osman & 164 Others v Northern Rangelands Trust & 8 Others, Petition E006 of 2021, [2025] KEELC 99 (KLR), delivered on 24 January 2025, a three-judge bench of the Environment and Land Court at Isiolo, comprising Angote, Yano and Nzili JJ, held that the establishment of Cherab and Bulesa Biliqo Community Conservancies was undertaken without due public participation and was consequently unconstitutional. The court declared the two conservancies to be “operating illegally”. It issued a permanent injunction restraining NRT, its rangers, its agents and its partners from any conservancy operations within the affected wards. It ordered the County Government of Isiolo and the Ministry of Lands to register the community land as required under the Community Land Act, 2016. It declared the deployment of armed NRT rangers unconstitutional and unlawful for want of vetting under the National Police Service Act.
Bulesa Biliqo, it must be remembered, generates about twenty percent of all carbon credits in the entire NRT project. Half of the participating conservancies sit in materially identical legal positions. In May 2025 Verra suspended the project for the second time, this time in response to the judgment. Mbaria and Ogada had warned, years earlier, that the conservation industry in Kenya was operating without regard to the rule of law. The court has now said the same thing in formal terms.
Three lessons emerge.
First, the carbon market in Kenya was, until very recently, a legal lacuna. Soil carbon was not contemplated by the Wildlife Conservation and Management Act, 2013. It was not contemplated by the Community Land Act, 2016. The earliest tranches of NRT credits were sold to multinational corporations on a methodological architecture that no Kenyan statute had endorsed and no Kenyan community had meaningfully consented to. The Climate Change (Amendment) Act, 2023, assented to by the President on 15 September 2023, has begun to fill that void. It now requires every land-based carbon project to be implemented through a Community Development Agreement, recorded in the National Carbon Registry, providing an annual community contribution of not less than 40 percent of the aggregate earnings of the previous year. That is a significant statutory floor. It is also an admission, however quiet, that the floor was previously zero.
Second, “community” is a contested word. NRT and its defenders have always invoked the idea of community: community conservancies, community boards and community ranger units. But in Osman, the court was clear that the relevant community had not been consulted. In Mbaria and Ogada’s terms, what had been built was a parallel governance structure, sustained by donor money and rifle-bearing rangers, that performed the rituals of community participation while extracting the substance of land control. The true test of community is not the brochure. It is whether the community can say no.
Third and most painful, the carbon credits economy as currently constituted in much of Africa is the latest costume of an old script. Where the colonial state took land for crown reserves and game parks, the contemporary carbon project takes land for offset volumes. Where the missionary brought salvation in exchange for sovereignty, the climate broker brings climate virtue in exchange for grazing rights. The currency is new. The exchange is not. Mbaria and Ogada saw this clearly in 2016 when the carbon discourse had not yet fully seized the imagination of the conservation industry. They wrote of conservation as a tool for economic and political control. A decade on, that is precisely what carbon has become in many of the rangelands they wrote about.
None of this means carbon markets are inherently incompatible with community welfare. They can be allies of justice. But the conditions are exacting. They include:
Registered community land under the Community Land Act, 2016, with title vested in the community itself and not held in indefinite trust on its behalf.
Free, prior and informed consent evidenced not by the signature of a paid intermediary but by the demonstrable engagement of the community in its own deliberative spaces.
A Community Development Agreement that is negotiated rather than presented; whose financial flows are auditable in real time; and whose terms can be revisited without penalty.
Independent verification that does not rely on the project proponent for data, methodology or access to affected communities.
A genuine right of exit, including the right of a community to withdraw from a carbon project without forfeiting its land or its livelihood.
Domestic legal accountability, with project disputes adjudicated in Kenyan courts and enforced under Kenyan law.
Anything less is what Mbaria and Ogada called it: a lie, dressed for a new market.
The pastoralists of Isiolo did not need a carbon ecologist to tell them what was happening on their grasslands. They needed lawyers. They got them. And on 24 January 2025, the Environment and Land Court told them, in the dry register of the constitutional text, what they had been saying in the open register of village meetings for almost fifteen years. They were right. The project was unlawful. The conservancies were unconstitutional. The rangers had no business being there.
That is the moment, perhaps, to retire the slogans and read the book again. The Big Conservation Lie is not anti-conservation. It is anti-deception. The distinction matters. And in the carbon economy now sweeping the rangelands of East Africa, that distinction may be the difference between climate justice and climate dispossession.