Kenya’s latest national climate plan reflects its ambitions to raise millions of dollars in climate finance by tapping into the voluntary carbon market, even as two of its biggest offsetting projects face scrutiny over tensions with local Indigenous communities.
Verra, the main global certifier of carbon credits, this week suspended the Northern Kenya Rangelands Carbon Project (NKRCP) for the second time for a review following a ruling by a Kenyan court earlier this year.
In a case brought by 165 community members, the court decided in January that two of the conservancies established by the project’s manager, Northern Rangelands Trust (NRT), had been set up unconstitutionally, according to Survival International, a charity that works to protect tribal peoples.
The case followed a 2023 report by the human rights group, which found flaws in the process for obtaining consent from participating communities and breaches of the Community Land Act. It also questioned the project’s carbon storage calculations, saying they were based on monitoring information that was “unfit for the purpose”.
That prompted Verra’s first suspension of the project, which was lifted eight months later following a review that identified areas in need of improvement but not more serious failings.
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NRT, which announced leadership changes this week, said the new review “reflects due diligence following (the) recent court ruling that raised broader questions about land governance in Kenya”.
“The review does not stem from new concerns about the project’s methodology or technical foundations. The project remains fully compliant with the requirements of the Verified Carbon Standard,” Communications Director Moses Wakhisi added in an emailed statement.
Kajiado County protest
Verra’s latest move on Tuesday came weeks after protests by villagers opposed to another soil carbon project on Indigenous-owned grazing land in the East African country, which is still awaiting certification.
Stretching across swathes of grazing land in southern Kenya, the Kajiado Rangeland Carbon Project (KRCP) is billed by its developers as a way to remove millions of tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere and protect its inhabitants, and biodiversity, for decades to come.
In Kenya and elsewhere in Africa, such projects are an “immense opportunity” that can provide a critical source of much-needed climate finance, according to the Africa Carbon Markets Initiative (ACMI), a UN-backed initiative launched at COP27.
But just as the government’s updated Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) plan was being submitted to the United Nations climate body on April 30, a protest by some villagers from the Oldonyo-Nyokie Group Ranch in Kajiado County, home to the pastoralist Maasai people, spotlighted tensions within local communities over the leasing of ancestral lands for carbon-offsetting initiatives.
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The opposition of dozens of community members, who shouted “No carbon” and waved sticks during the meeting, prevented the signing of a 40-year lease on some 68,000 hectares (168,000 acres) of land as part of the much larger KRCP, Kenya’s Daily Nation newspaper reported.
Locals opposed to the initiative said the Kenya-based company that is leading it, Soils for the Future Africa (SftFA), had not followed the right process of obtaining consent from community members and accused it of getting some signatures under false pretences.
Herders who support it say better pasture management would help them deal with climate change impacts, and give them an additional income source.
SftFA did not respond to requests for comment. A company official has previously blamed a “misinformation campaign” for linking existing land tensions in the community to the project.
Sustainable development?
Kenya has been hard hit by climate-related losses in recent years, with floods and droughts in particular taking a heavy toll on the livelihoods.
It is targeting international funds, including from the voluntary carbon market, for about 80% of the cost of the climate change policies outlined in its NDC, which include cutting emissions by 35% and reaching 100% renewable energy generation by 2035.
President William Ruto has called carbon credits his country’s “next significant export” and said a new legal framework for engagement in the voluntary carbon market will mean host communities will see at least 40% of the proceeds.
But across the continent, questions about the credibility of carbon credit projects pose a threat to their development, according to the ACMI.
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On top of the unease among some Indigenous communities, carbon offsetting has faced mounting scepticism around the world. Critics say the approach fails to deliver real-world emissions reductions, and gives polluters a licence to continue burning fossil fuels, while “greenwashing” the damage they cause.
They also point to the global inequalities perpetuated by the system – with big global companies based in the Global North buying offsets from projects in the Global South that often fail to benefit local communities.
Soil project’s US backers
According to a KRCP document seen by Climate Home, the 1.5-million hectare (3.7-million acre) soil carbon initiative in Kajiado is expected to store more than 48 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) over the project’s 40-year lifetime, and will generate carbon credits for Climate Asset Management (CAM), a UK-based joint venture of HSBC Asset Management and Pollination.
It is supported by CarbonSolve, a US-based carbon project developer and Biodiversity Research Institute, a US non-profit.
Under the rotational grazing practice it promotes, herders are not allowed to graze more than once on one location during the wet or dry season. Locally hired grazing coordinators from the participating communities will be recruited to ensure compliance.
The aim of this process is to ensure that some areas are left fallow for one year to allow recovery from past grazing, or to serve as grass banks during the dry season or droughts.
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Kenyan land rights activist Leonida Odongo said poor communication with local people was often an issue, with communities whose land is being leased for the initiatives sometimes unaware of exactly how they will be affected.
“Communities sign documents they don’t understand … and locals don’t get the chance to interrogate the potential impacts into the future,” she told Climate Home, adding that project backers sometimes gloss over the changes that pastoralists, for example, are required to make.
As Kenya looks to ramp up investment in offsetting projects, Mohamed Adow, founder of Kenya-based think-tank Power Shift Africa, said measures to protect local people’s rights are vital.
“It must protect community rights, prevent exploitation of land and prioritise environmental integrity and accountability,” he said.
The post Indigenous land disputes cloud Kenya’s carbon market ambitions appeared first on Climate Home News.
Indigenous land disputes cloud Kenya’s carbon market ambitions
When carbon dioxide (CO2) is released from a factory or power plant, the gas can be captured and permanently stored underground, preventing it from driving climate change.
This is the idea underpinning carbon capture and storage (CCS), a technology that is at the heart of many nations’ net-zero plans.
Influential organisations, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), describe CCS as “critical” for cutting emissions from key sectors – and for helping to avoid dangerous global warming.
In particular, capturing CO2 is seen as one of the only viable options for decarbonising some of the world’s highest-emitting industries, such as cement production.
The UK, for example, has committed to investing as much as £21.7bn over the coming decades in its nascent CCS industry, as part of the nation’s net-zero strategy.
Yet, in the UK and elsewhere, there has been a backlash against plans for CCS.
Citing high costs, ties to the fossil-fuel industry and a “history of poor performance”, critics describe CCS as a “dangerous distraction” or a “false climate solution”.
Time and again, the outlook for the roll-out of CCS has been scaled back, as the technology has failed to deliver as quickly as expected – and as policy support has wavered.
Furthermore, critics state that the technology remains “unproven” on the scale required to make a meaningful impact on global emissions.
In this Q&A, Carbon Brief explores the role CCS is expected to play in achieving net-zero, its record to date and the reasons it has been criticised, using the UK as an example.
What is CCS?
CCS involves capturing CO2 emissions released from a large source, such as a gas power plant or a cement factory.
The CO2 is separated from the facility’s exhaust stream, generally using a chemical solvent, before being compressed into a liquid and transported via pipeline or vehicle. The CO2 is then stored by injecting it into underground reservoirs, such as depleted oil fields or saline aquifers.
The term “CCUS” is sometimes also used, referring to the “utilisation” of CO2 to make products, including fertilisers, fuels or building materials. Such uses do not necessarily lead to permanent emissions cuts, as the CO2 can end up later being released back into the atmosphere.
(“CCS” is used in this Q&A, unless quoting another organisation that specifically refers to “CCUS”.)
The infographic below shows the stages of capturing CO2 and transporting it to be either stored or used in other applications.
Carbon capture technology was originally rolled out at US and Canadian oil wells in the early 1970s as a way to achieve “enhanced oil recovery”. This involves injecting captured CO2 into depleted wells – a process that stores CO2, but also helps to extract more oil.
This remains, by far, the most significant end use for captured CO2 worldwide, with around three-quarters of it used for this purpose.
Moreover, most of the CO2 currently captured is a by-product of gas purification – the process by which fossil fuels such as methane are separated from other, unwanted substances. Selling this CO2 can make such gas projects more economically viable.
Therefore, as shown in the chart below, which is based on International Energy Agency (IEA) data, the majority of CO2 that is both captured and used today helps the fossil-fuel industry to extract and sell more oil and gas.
CCS was first proposed as a way to deal with CO2 emissions in a 1976 academic article, which imagined injecting the captured gas into the ocean.
It is only since the early 2000s that CCS has gained traction as a proposed climate solution, with a 2005 “special report” by the IPCC exploring the topic. At that time, the authors note there were just three small-scale projects trying to capture and permanently store CO2.
Installing CCS at factories or power plants and permanently storing the CO2 would mean that, in theory, such facilities could continue using fossil fuels without contributing to climate change.
Such applications are often mentioned alongside two related technologies, both of which could be used to “suck” CO2 out of the atmosphere and, thus, deliver “negative emissions”.
One is bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). Crops absorb CO2 as they grow and BECCS involves a power plant burning these crops, then storing the resulting CO2.
The other technology is direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS).
These technologies are classed as “CO2 removal”, as they involve absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere using plants or machines and then storing it permanently.
By contrast, CCS installed at a factory is considered a way to avoid CO2 emitted by that specific facility from entering the atmosphere. This Q&A focuses on such applications, which account for the vast majority of existing and planned CCS.
How much CCS capacity has been built so far?
As of February 2026, there were a total of 75 operational CCS projects around the world. As noted above, almost all of them are at fossil-fuel extraction and processing sites, according to the IEA’s database.
Together, these projects capture 62.5m tonnes of CO2 (MtCO2) each year. This is equivalent to the annual greenhouse gas emissions of Ecuador.
(This compares with the 22 CCS projects, promising to capture 40MtCO2 annually, that were operational or under construction as of 2014.)
As the chart below shows, the amount of CO2 currently being captured and stored is a tiny fraction of the total emissions from fossil-fuel use.
In a 2020 report, the IEA explained that the “story of CCUS has largely been one of unmet expectations: its potential to mitigate climate change has been recognised for decades, but deployment has been slow”.
A wave of interest in CCS in the 2000s, largely from countries in Europe and North America, focused on enabling coal power plants to continue operating with lower emissions.
This interest largely petered out, as plummeting renewable energy costs weakened the case for coal plants with CCS. Today, there are only seven operating CCS-coal plants worldwide – five in China, one in the US and one in Canada.
Yet the Paris Agreement in 2015 – and the national net-zero targets that followed – highlighted the need for deep emissions cuts in sectors that previously expected to continue emitting for decades. This, once again, has fuelled interest in the use of CCS.
In recent years, there has also been growing interest in producing low-carbon “blue” hydrogen from gas with CCS.
Hydrogen is widely seen as key for decarbonising certain sectors – particularly in industry – but analyses suggest that it may be difficult to make sufficient “green” hydrogen using renewable power on the timescales required.
As the map below shows, most CCS capacity is based in the US and Canada, with other major fossil-fuel producers such as Norway, Brazil and the Gulf states also contributing.
A surge of projects have entered the global CCS pipeline in recent years. According to the IEA, 93.7MtCO2 of capture or storage capacity is under construction as of February 2026 and another 1,279.6MtCO2 is in the “planning” stages.
“Planned” projects include any initiative at early concept, feasibility or engineering study stages and the industry has a long history of projects being cancelled or delayed.
Nevertheless, this pipeline of projects could lead to a large expansion of facilities dedicated to permanent CO2 storage that does not involve extracting more oil.
The planned projects – if they are realised – would also include significant growth in sectors where CCS is virtually non-existent, such as steel, hydrogen and cement production, as shown in the chart below.
What role is CCS expected to play in reaching net-zero?
It will be impossible to stop dangerous climate change unless the world reaches net-zero emissions, according to the IPCC. The amount of global warming – and whether the Paris Agreement temperature target can be met – depends on when net-zero is reached.
Many global pathways that have been set out for achieving net-zero, including a majority of the IPCC-assessed pathways where global warming is limited to 1.5C, rely on the use of CCS at fossil-fuel plants and industrial sites.
“These models have been quite instrumental in bringing CCS back onto the agenda,” Lina Lefstad, an ecological economist at Lund University, tells Carbon Brief.
Influential organisations relying on CCS in their net-zero scenarios range from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) through to the oil company Shell. The IEA has stated that net-zero would be “virtually impossible” without CCS.
These scenarios often include 10s to 100s of times more CCS capacity being built in the coming decades. The IEA includes 1.7GtCO2 being captured by 2035 in its net-zero scenario – nearly 30 times more than is captured today.
(Some of the much higher numbers in scenarios assessed by the IPCC have been dismissed by experts as implausible, especially given the slow rollout of CCS to date.)
When considering CCS for both emissions cuts and removals, Dr Jennifer Roberts, a researcher at the University of Strathclyde and deputy director at the UK Carbon Capture and Storage Research Centre (UKCCSRC), tells Carbon Brief the situation is clear:
“From an IPCC climate modelling perspective…reaching net-zero without CCS is far more expensive, disruptive and potentially out of reach.”
This does not mean that it would be impossible to reach net-zero without using CCS. However, net-zero scenarios that use little or no CCS rely on dramatic changes elsewhere, such as much lower global energy demand.
Net-zero scenarios often include a crucial role for CCS in “hard-to-abate” sectors, referring to activities that lack available, low-cost options to fully decarbonise. In particular, CCS is widely seen as vital for decarbonising parts of heavy industry.
The IPCC sixth assessment report (AR6) summary for policymakers calls CCS a “critical mitigation option” for some sectors, including cement and chemicals. The technical summary of the AR6 Working Group III report says that “CCS will be required to mitigate remaining CO2” in industrial sectors.
The IEA describes CCS as “virtually the only technology” that can significantly cut cement emissions, which account for around 7% of the global total. (Much of this CO2 comes from chemical processes, meaning it would still be released if the industry was electrified.)
Yet, the understanding of “hard-to-abate” emissions is changing, as alternatives to CCS become cheaper and increasingly available. As a result, CCS has become a less attractive option in some sectors, as well as being seen as less vital in some others.
Carbon Brief analysis shows that the IEA has reduced its outlook for CCS in the power sector by a third, compared to its expectations in 2021, as the chart below shows.
This reflects both slow progress in deploying CCS and rapid cost reductions in renewables, which make running gas or coal power plants less attractive.