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A keenly-watched legal ruling in Kenya has delivered a huge blow to a flagship carbon offset project used by Meta, Netflix, British Airways and other multinational corporations, which has long been under fire from Indigenous activists.
The ruling, in a case brought by 165 members of affected communities, affirms that two of the biggest conservancies set up by the controversial Northern Rangelands Trust (NRT) have been established unconstitutionally and have no basis in law.
The court has also ordered that the heavily-armed NRT rangers – who have been accused of repeated, serious human rights abuses against the area’s Indigenous people – must leave these conservancies.
One of the two conservancies involved in the case, known as Biliqo Bulesa, contributes about a fifth of the carbon credits involved in the highly contentious NRT project to sell carbon offsets to Western corporations.
The ruling likely applies to around half the other conservancies involved in the carbon project too, as they are in the same legal position, even though they were not part of the lawsuit. This means that the whole project, from which NRT has made many millions of dollars already (the exact amount is not known as the organisation does not publish financial accounts), is now at risk.
Watch Borana leader Abdullahi Hajj Gonjobe denounce the devastating impact the NRT’s conservancies have on their pastoralist way of life.
The case was first filed in 2021, but judgment has only recently been delivered by the Isiolo Environment and Land Court. The legal issue at the heart of this case was identified in Survival International’s “Blood carbon” report, which also disputed the very basis of NRT’s carbon project: its claim that by controlling the activities of Indigenous pastoralists’ livestock, it increases the area’s vegetation and thus the amount of carbon stored in the soil.
The ruling is also the latest in a series of setbacks to the credibility of Verra, the main body used to verify carbon credit projects. Even though some of the participating conservancies in the NRT’s project lacked a clear legal basis and therefore could not ‘own’ or ‘transfer’ carbon credits to the NRT, the project was still validated and approved by Verra, and went through two verifications in their system. Complaints by Survival International prompted a review of the project in 2023, which also failed to address the problem.
Caroline Pearce, Director of Survival International, said today: “The judgement confirms what the communities have been saying for years – that they were not properly consulted about the creation of the conservancies, which have undermined their land rights. The NRT’s Western donors, like the EU, France and USAID, must now stop funding the organization, as they’ve been funding an operation which is now ruled to have been illegal.
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“This ruling poses some very awkward questions for both the NRT and Verra, as it shows that there is no legal basis for at least a significant portion of the carbon project. The carbon credits issued by it should now be considered invalid.”
“Unfortunately, this NRT disaster is far from an isolated problem. Too many of these carbon offset schemes follow the same outdated model as traditional “fortress” conservation – claiming to ‘protect’ land while trampling over the rights of the Indigenous owners of it, and making handsome profits in the process.
“That NRT has also cut legal corners while doing so should not be surprising, and was pointed out by Survival years ago. It’s long past time for Verra to finally conduct a proper review and scrap this project once and for all.”
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