Offsetting carbon emissions—yet the planet still burns. Whose interests come first?
By Edward Githae | A Special Investigation
In June 2024, Kenya hosted the world’s largest carbon market auction, selling more than 2.2 million tonnes of carbon credits to eager corporate buyers. The event was hailed as a triumph for climate finance in Africa, promising to channel hundreds of millions of dollars toward conservation while allowing companies to neutralise their emissions. Yet by year’s end, a devastating reality had emerged: analysis of 50 major offset projects reveals that 39 of them—78%—are “likely junk,” prioritising polluters’ profits over planetary survival.
This investigation, drawing on court documents, satellite data, and community testimonies from Kenya, China, Peru, and Brazil, exposes how the $2-3 billion carbon offset industry has devolved into a 21st-century colonial extractive scheme. As greenhouse gas concentrations continue their relentless rise, the question becomes urgent: are carbon offsets a genuine climate solution, or merely an elaborate accounting trick that allows business as usual to continue?
The junk credit pipeline
The Northern Kenya Rangelands Carbon Project epitomised the promise of carbon offsets done right—until it didn’t. Backed by Netflix, Meta, and British Airways, the project claimed it would “remove and store 50 million tons of carbon dioxide over the course of 30 years” across nearly two million hectares of Kenya’s arid north. Yet the project has been suspended twice by Verra, the world’s leading carbon credit certifier, after advocacy groups raised “serious questions” about its methodology and credibility.
The suspension followed a pattern replicated across continents. Shell’s “carbon-neutral” liquefied gas relied on Chinese rice projects where farmers denied implementing the methane-reducing techniques for which credits were sold. Verra subsequently revoked 37 such projects as “ghost schemes.” In Germany, a $1.5 billion carbon credit scandal exposed how 45 of 66 Chinese projects used forged documents and phantom audits during COVID-19 travel restrictions, exploiting the inability of verifiers to conduct on-site visits.
The scale of deception is staggering. Airlines like Delta and easyJet purchased over 35 million worthless credits while simultaneously expanding their fossil fuel operations. ExxonMobil acquired 3.7 million junk credits—comprising 49% of its offset portfolio—while expanding oil drilling operations. Even luxury brands joined the charade: Gucci retired 4.4 million credits, 75% classified as junk, before quietly abandoning its “carbon neutral” claims in 2024.
Financialised colonialism
Behind the technical failures lies a darker story of power and exploitation. The Northern Rangelands Trust (NRT), a Kenya-based conservancy network founded by a colonial family, controls 10% of Kenya’s land while selling credits to Meta and Shell. The organisation’s operations embody what critics term “carbon colonialism”—the extraction of environmental resources for others’ benefit under the guise of climate action.
In January 2025, a Kenyan court delivered a devastating verdict: two of NRT’s largest conservancies had been established unconstitutionally and “have no basis in law.” The ruling validated community concerns that had festered for years. In 2021, 165 pastoralists from two conservation areas took the unprecedented step of suing NRT, claiming the organisation had “failed to gain the informed consent of affected communities” before selling carbon credits to major corporations.
The Borana Council of Elders publicly denounced NRT’s carbon trading scheme as “skullduggery,” highlighting the deep distrust between project developers and indigenous communities. Their grievances centre on a fundamental clash: the Northern Kenya Grassland Carbon Project explicitly aims to replace “traditional indigenous livestock grazing methods” with controlled systems that align with carbon measurement standards—a disruption to centuries-old cultural practices.
The human cost is stark. In Isiolo County, 43% of livestock died when carbon project restrictions blocked traditional migration routes. NRT employs Maasai women for invasive species removal at KES 480 ($3.70) per day without protective gear, exposing them to toxic herbicides and injuries. Meanwhile, promised benefits remain elusive. “They promised us schools and boreholes,” says James Lekenit, a Samburu elder. “Instead, we cannot graze our cattle where our fathers grazed theirs, and the money never reaches us.”
The eviction economy
Kenya’s experience reflects a broader pattern of displacement across Africa’s carbon frontier. Dubai-based Blue Carbon partnered with the Kenya Forest Service to evict the Ogiek people from Mau Forest—violating a 2017 African Court ruling—to secure offset land. “They pulled down houses with axes… we don’t know where to go,” testified evictee Elisabeth Nguliso.
Similar patterns emerge globally. In Peru, Australian conman David Nelson tricked Indigenous Matsés communities into signing 200-year forest rights contracts in exchange for “billions in carbon revenue” that never materialised, defrauding tribes of 500,000 hectares. The cases reveal how offset projects systematically target marginalised communities with weak tenure rights, transforming ancestral lands into commodities for distant corporations.
The science fraud
Beneath the humanitarian crisis lies systematic scientific fraud. The suspended Northern Kenya Rangelands project claimed carbon storage of 0.75 tonnes per hectare per year, yet its own data showed vegetation decline in 48.5% of project areas. The Kasigau Corridor project’s “avoided deforestation” credits relied on exaggerated threats; satellite data revealed minimal historical tree loss, making the credits scientifically baseless.
The methodology manipulation extends to brazen regulatory evasion. Projects exploit technical loopholes by segmenting contiguous areas—such as 200-kilometre Chinese rice fields—into “small-scale” plots to avoid stringent audits. Climate Home News exposed this tactic using satellite imagery, revealing how verification becomes a paper exercise divorced from physical reality.
The additionality problem—whether emission reductions would have occurred without carbon credit incentives—proves impossible to resolve within current market structures. When projects claim credit for protecting grasslands already experiencing reduced grazing pressure due to urbanisation or climate adaptation, the fundamental counterfactual becomes meaningless.
Regulatory capture and verification farce
The verification system itself has become complicit in fraud. Verra’s third-party validators receive fees from project developers, creating perverse incentives to approve dubious schemes. Four auditors now face sanctions for rubber-stamping China’s ghost rice projects. TÜV Rheinland, a top verifier, faces fraud investigations related to the German carbon credit scandal.
Kenya’s regulatory response reveals similar capture dynamics. The Climate Change Amendment Act, implemented in September 2023, positions Kenya primarily as “a source of carbon credits and offsets trading overseas” rather than ensuring community benefits or environmental integrity. While the government proposes channelling “at least 15% of carbon credit revenues” toward climate initiatives, the actual revenue-sharing formula for local communities remains inadequately defined.
The suspension of Kenya’s flagship carbon projects has significantly “clouded the country’s hopes of raising climate finance from the offset market,” demonstrating how social conflicts directly undermine the financial viability of these schemes. Yet rather than addressing underlying injustices, the regulatory response focuses on restoring investor confidence.
Corporate greenwashing machinery
For corporations, the offset system provides something invaluable: the ability to claim carbon neutrality without fundamental business model changes. Shell faces Dutch lawsuits for “carbon-neutral driving” advertisements using discredited forestry credits. Tech giants like Meta and Netflix find purchasing offset credits far cheaper than the deep operational changes required for genuine emissions reduction.
The system thus becomes a subsidy for continued pollution by the world’s largest emitters. When offset projects are suspended—as in Kenya—companies retain the reputational benefits of past sustainability claims while communities continue bearing the costs of disrupted livelihoods. The atmosphere distinguishes neither between emissions reduced at source nor those supposedly offset elsewhere; every tonne released today contributes to warming regardless of the promises attached.
Beyond the mirage
The accumulating evidence demands fundamental reform, not incremental adjustment. Three pathways emerge from the wreckage:
Radical Transparency: Blockchain registries enabling real-time credit tracking and AI-assisted satellite monitoring to detect leakage or fraud, as piloted by Berlin’s Adelphi institute. Current verification relies on intermittent site visits and self-reporting by project developers—an approach that has proven systematically inadequate.
Justice-Centred Standards: Mandating 70% revenue sharing to communities via independently audited trusts, enforcing Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC) with women holding 50% of voting shares, and establishing independent grievance mechanisms outside project structures. Kenya’s experience shows that without enforceable community rights, carbon projects become extractive by design.
Corporate Accountability: Banning climate claims reliant on offsets and requiring absolute emissions cuts—90% by 2030—before permitting limited credit use for residual emissions. The current system enables corporations to monetise pollution while displacing climate action indefinitely into the future.
Yet even reformed offset markets may prove inadequate to climate imperatives. Africa contributes just 4% of historical emissions but suffers disproportionate climate impacts. As Amos Wemanya of Power Shift Africa argues: “Grants avoid indebtedness from an unjust financial system.” Reparations-based climate finance acknowledges historical responsibility rather than creating new markets for continued extraction.
Conservation without colonialism
The fundamental question remains: who should control Africa’s carbon resources? The Ogiek, Maasai, and Matsés have safeguarded ecosystems for millennia through sophisticated land management systems. Their displacement in the name of carbon accounting represents both injustice and ecological folly.
“Conservation should be by communities who ancestrally own the land—not corporations who commodify it,” declares the Pastoralist Women’s Council of Kenya. This wisdom challenges the entire premise of carbon markets: that distant corporations can purchase the right to pollute by controlling African lands through financial instruments.
Indigenous territories contain 80% of the world’s remaining biodiversity despite comprising just 22% of global land area. Their stewardship success stems not from market incentives but from cultural relationships with landscapes spanning generations. Carbon accounting, with its focus on measurable sequestration rates and standardised methodologies, cannot capture these complex socio-ecological systems.
A reckoning overdue
As Kenya’s courts overturn illegal conservancies and Germany claws back $1.5 billion in fraudulent credits, a new paradigm emerges. The carbon offset mirage has enabled corporations to monetise pollution while displacing the vulnerable, transforming climate finance into a mechanism for continued extraction rather than genuine transformation.
The scientific evidence is unambiguous: avoiding dangerous climate change requires immediate, deep emissions reductions—not the distant, uncertain, and often reversible benefits promised by offset schemes. IPCC assessments consistently emphasise that 1.5°C warming demands unprecedented decarbonisation rates incompatible with offset-dependent corporate strategies.
The window for effective climate action is rapidly closing. Every year of delay, every tonne of emissions justified by dubious offsets, every community displaced for corporate sustainability claims, brings closer the tipping points that threaten civilisation itself. The carbon offset industry has consumed precious time and resources while failing to deliver the climate action it promised.
The stakes could not be higher: the credibility of global climate governance, the rights of vulnerable communities, and the stability of Earth’s climate system. On each measure, the current carbon offset system is failing catastrophically. Only by acknowledging these failures—and the extractive logic that underlies them—can alternatives emerge worthy of the planetary emergency we face.
The Ogiek returning to Mau Forest, the pastoralists reclaiming their grazing routes, the Matsés asserting sovereignty over their territories: these acts of resistance point toward climate solutions rooted in justice rather than accounting tricks. When fertile land becomes a commodity, the planet burns—and the poor pay with their lives. The time has come to extinguish the carbon offset mirage and build climate action on foundations of truth.
Call to Action: This investigation represents the first in our ongoing series examining climate accountability across Africa. Subscribe to our investigative series for deeper insights into environmental governance, corporate responsibility, and community rights. The climate crisis demands transparency—and your engagement helps make it possible.
SDG Impact: This investigation contributes to SDG 13 (Climate Action) by exposing barriers to effective climate policy, and SDG 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production) by questioning unsustainable corporate practices disguised as environmental responsibility.
“When fertile land becomes a commodity, the planet burns—and the poor pay with their lives.”
