The carbon land grab in Kenya

SOMO investigates the expanding market for land-based carbon offset projects in Kenya.

PHOTO Credit: SOMO.

More than 5.4 million hectares of land in Kenya are tied to land-based carbon offset projects. This is almost as much as the total area of arable land in the country.

A recent investigation by SOMO shows how the global carbon trading industry is changing land ownership, governance, and livelihoods in Kenya. The report finds that carbon projects benefit foreign investors far more than local communities. Vast areas of land are being commodified for the benefit of corporations in the Global North. This process is “entrenching (neo)colonial power dynamics while communities bear the social, ecological, and economic costs”, SOMO writes.

In 2022, at COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Kenya’s President William Ruto announced that “Kenya’s next significant export will be carbon credits.” Ruto launched a project to increase tree cover in Kenya from 12% to 30% by 2032. This would involve planting 15 billion trees, on an area of about 10.6 million hectares, at a cost estimated at US$5 billion.

SOMO notes that, “by attaching property rights to carbon, offsetting fuels an industry that further intensifies pressure on and encloses vast areas of land”.

Meanwhile, Kenya is facing a debt crisis. In September 2025 the country’s public debt stood at US$92.5 billion. Interest payments account for almost 50% of government revenue. The government is resorting to taking out new loans, internationally and domestically, to repay older ones.

Rich countries have promised climate finance repeatedly over the years at COP meetings. But little of the promised money has actually been delivered.

SOMO writes that,

Against this backdrop, the offset industry is being presented as a cure-all, promising to fund both climate mitigation and adaptation at the national and local levels. In practice, however, most money circulates among private industry actors in the Global North, diverting resources away from communities’ urgent needs.

Africa Carbon Markets Initiative

In 2022, also at COP27, President Ruto and other African heads of state launched the Africa Carbon Markets Initiative (ACMI). Designed with the help of US consulting firm, McKinsey, ACMI is dominated by carbon industry representatives.

In a statement put out at the launch of ACMI, Kwami Kpondzo of Friends of the Earth Togo said that,

“It would seem African leaders are determined not to learn from their mistakes of the past. For a fictional initiative that keeps Africa locked in the fossil fuels trap to be conceived of at a time that Africa is in the grip of climate crisis is totally inconceivable and unacceptable.”

Carbon projects in Kenya

SOMO created a database of land-based carbon projects in Kenya. There are 36 active projects in the country. The three largest projects account for 65% of the total of 5.4 million hectares under carbon offset projects.

SOMO highlights three examples of carbon projects in Kenya:

• Nine TIST (The International Small Group and Tree Planting Program) projects run by Clean Air Action Corporation, a US-based company. These projects cover about 40,000 hectares and involve more than 20,000 farmers.
  While the farmers own the trees, CAAC owns the carbon stored in the trees. Projects run for between 29 and 60 years. Farmers must plant at least 1,000 trees, replant any trees that die, and can only cut down trees if they follow TIST-defined “best practices”.
  The danger is that farmers’ decisions about planting, harvesting, crop choice, and other land-use decisions are dismissed. Carbon becomes all important, in order that carbon credits can be sold. SOMO notes that this raises “concerns about who ultimately controls the land”.

• The Northern Kenya Grassland Carbon project run by the Northern Rangelands Trust covers almost 2 million hectares. NRT is funded in part by international donors, including the EU, Denmark, and Italy. The project has sold credits to Meta, Netflix, Kering, Beiersdorf, and British Airways.
  More than 100,000 people live inside the project area, including Indigenous pastoralists whose livelihoods depend on their livestock. The project aims to replace “unplanned” traditional grazing with “planned rotational grazing”. NRT claims that this would increase the carbon stored in the soil thus generating carbon credits.

  Verra suspended the project in 2023 following a detailed critique of the project by Survival International. But Verra’s review failed to address most of the concerned raised and the project was reinstated.

  In January 2025, the Environment and Land Court in Isiolo issued a ruling that two of the conservancies that form part of the project were established unconstitutionally. The Court ruled that local consultation was inadequate and ordered the withdrawal of NRT’s armed rangers.

  In May 2025, Verra suspended the project for the second time. Verra is still carrying out its review.

• In 2023, research by the Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC) and SOMO revealed “widespread sexual harassment and abuse” at the Kasigau Corridor REDD project run by the US-based company Wildlife Works.
  SOMO writes that, “The findings revealed that Wildlife Works allowed or enabled a pattern of serious abuse to persist in Kasigau for over a decade, while marketing the project as ethical to major corporate clients, including Microsoft, Netflix, McKinsey, and Shell.”
  Five different auditing and verifying firms audited the project 10 times over a 12-year period, but failed to detect and report the abuses.
  Wildlife Works sacked two people following the report. Verra suspended the project briefly but its credits are now back on the market. SOMO considers Verra’s review to be “A flawed review with harmful omissions.”

Foreign profits

The carbon trading industry consists of a large and complex network of actors, including standard setters, auditors, developers, and carbon brokers and consultants. All have incentives to generate more carbon credits rather than fewer, because their business model involves profiting from the generation and sale of carbon credits. It’s an industry built on conflicts of interest.

Of the 36 projects in SOMO’s database of carbon projects in Kenya, 30 were developed by companies from the Global North. Only six had roots in Kenya — and some of these projects involved consortia of companies from Kenya and the USA.

Similarly, the carbon industry’s auditors are largely based in the Global North. Of the 36 carbon projects, SOMO found 92 audits conducted between 2004 and 2024. Of these 75% of the auditors are based in the Global North, and the remainder in India.

“The pattern is unmistakable,” SOMO writes, “those reaping the profits from Kenya’s land-based carbon offsets are mainly based outside the African continent.”

And of course, the vast majority of the buyers of carbon credits are Big Polluters from rich countries, such as Shell, Delta Airlines, Apple, and Netflix. And contrary to carbon industry propaganda, companies that buy carbon credits do not decarbonise faster than those that don’t.

The Climate Change (Carbon Markets) Regulations, 2024

In 2024, Kenya introduced legal reforms supposedly to regulate the carbon market. In reality, the Climate Change (Carbon Markets) Regulations, 2024 enhanced the carbon market.

The regulations introduced a national carbon registry, compulsory environmental impact assessments for all offsetting projects, and formal community development agreements that require developers to share at least 25% of revenues.

However, the law does not define carbon rights. As law student and journalist Jerameel Kevins Owuor Odhiambo points out,

This legal omission effectively dispossesses communities of ownership over the atmospheric benefits generated by their land management practices, creating a system where external actors can claim and monetize environmental services without community consent or equitable compensation. The adoption of Community Development Agreements from the extractive industry model further reinforces patterns of external control, treating communities as passive beneficiaries rather than active participants in decision-making processes.

Kenya’s national REDD Registry is the first in Africa. The development of the Registry was supported by Conservation International, the UK government, and S&P Global, a US-based financial services corporation. S&P Global published a whitepaper titled “Unlocking the potential of carbon markets: Designing carbon registries for success”. SOMO notes that the whitepaper makes no mention of land or community rights, but describes carbon as a “valuable national asset” to attract investment and accelerate economic growth.