Verra has suspended the Northern Kenya Rangelands Carbon project for the second time
Survival International: This is “an unprecedented indictment of the scheme” which “highlights Verra’s repeated failures”.
Verra has once again suspended the Northern Kenya Rangelands Carbon Project, the world’s largest soil-carbon project, according to the project developer, Northern Rangelands Trust. The project is controversial because of the restrictions it imposes on the traditional grazing practices of Indigenous Maasai, Borana, Samburu and other pastoralists.
A spokesperson for Verra told the Wall Street Journal that credits cannot be issued from the project until Verra’s review of the project is completed.
Survival International describes the second suspension as “an unprecedented indictment of the scheme” which “highlights Verra’s repeated failures”.
The project covers a total area of more than 2 million hectares and consists of 14 conservancies set up by Northern Rangelands Trust.
Court rules two conservancies unconstitutional
In January 2025, a Kenyan court ruled that two of NRT’s biggest conservancies, Cherab Conservancy and Biliqo Bulesa Conservancy in Isiolo County, were established unconstitutionally. Wall Street Journal’s Caroline Kimeu writes that,
Lawyers and rights groups representing pastoralists say the ruling, which applies to one of the biggest conservancies, invalidates around 20% of the entire project’s credits. They say credits in around half of the project’s 14 wildlife conservancies could be vulnerable to similar lawsuits.
That could result in large numbers of the carbon credits from the project being invalid. The project has sold a total of 6,193,393 carbon credits to companies including Netflix, Meta, NatWest Bank, LA Clippers, Kering, Salesforce, Beiersdorf, and Aspiration Partners.
“We will continue to assess the implications of the court’s ruling on the project and its related activities,” Verra’s spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal.
The lawsuit was filed in September 2021 by 165 community members. The court 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.
NRT requested a stay of execution on the ruling. On 1 April 2025, the court ruled that, “The plea for stay of execution is not merited.” NRT has also appealed against the ruling. The appeal has not yet been heard.1
Traditional grazing system “completely destroyed”
Hassan Bidhu was one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. He told the Wall Street Journal that the restrictions imposed by the carbon project were the final straw in an increasingly long list of limits on how pastoralists could use the land.
“The project completely destroyed the traditional system and brought another one, which is like a displacement,” Bidhu said.
During the drought in 2022, Bidhu fed his last two calves with shop-bought milk. He said that more of his cattle might have survived without the carbon project’s restrictions. Because of the carbon project, he is prevented from accessing pastures that have long been used during the dry season.
Verra’s second suspension of the project
This is the second time that Verra has suspended the project. In March 2023, Survival International published a report about NRT’s soil carbon project. Verra put the project on hold pending a “quality control review”.
By November 2023, Verra had finished the review and the project could once again sell carbon credits. But the review failed to address a single one of the problems raised in Survival International’s report.
Survival International commented that, “Verra’s ‘review’ of the Northern Rangelands Trust carbon offsetting project in Kenya is a shocking whitewash.”
In a response to Verra’s review, Survival International wrote,
[T]he 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.
In a statement about Verra’s second suspension of the project, Survival International’s Director, Caroline Pearce says,
“The NRT carbon credits scheme has violated Indigenous rights from the start, and has now become a complete fiasco. It’s impossible to understand how it was approved by Verra in the first place, and it should now be scrapped once and for all – along with the whole idea of violating Indigenous peoples’ rights to generate carbon credits.
“The land rights of the Maasai, Borana, Samburu and others should finally be recognized in full. That would be justice for them at last, and the best way to protect the grasslands of East Africa.”
CORRECTION — 14 May 2025: This sentence previously stated that the court had dismissed NRT’s Appeal. In fact, the appeal has not yet been heard. The court’s ruling in April 2025 was to dismiss NRT’s plea for a stay of execution.
Survival International’s president wanted it to support carbon trading, and tried to prevent the NGO opposing NRT land grabs. It’s one reason why Survival split after my retirement as CEO in 2021.
Looking at the above photo, I can’t see how that sun-drenched soil can hold much carbon and certainly not increased carbon without serious irrigation. And exactly how does one company (and not another, or multiple others) map out and claim any imagined environmental benefit therein for themselves, exclusively. This is colonialism, part 2.