Spending time in arid Northern Kenya with the Indigenous Samburu, Borana and Rendille people, and their beloved livestock, one cannot fail to be impressed by the incredible resilience of their way of life in such a “hostile” environment. Accelerating climate change, driven by the Global North and its corporations, has exacerbated drought in recent years. But thanks to their long-distance grazing patterns, that follow the rain as necessary, these pastoralist peoples are still able to thrive and feed their families.
But not for long.
An organization called The Northern Rangelands Trust (NRT) has pushed for the establishment of huge wildlife ‘conservancies’ in the area, which are patrolled by armed rangers. This has limited pastoralist land and contributed to an upsurge of violence. Now, NRT is running a carbon offset project that allows polluting companies to pretend they’re doing something to ‘fix’ the climate crisis while pastoralist peoples, who have done nothing to cause the crisis, pay the price.
The project claims to store additional carbon in the soil by replacing sustainable and self-sufficient pastoralist grazing patterns with a pattern that is centrally imposed and controlled, more akin to commercial ranching. The resulting carbon credits are being sold to companies like Netflix and Meta (Facebook), whose emissions are real, so they can claim to be “carbon neutral”.
NRT is making millions from this. But we are all losing.
Under examination, the project’s claims to store more carbon completely unravel. Instead, by enabling companies to greenwash their pollution, the scheme could accelerate rather than prevent climate change - while threatening sustainable, Indigenous ways of life and survival.
This is just one example of many offset projects initiated on Indigenous lands, without their consent, that could fund more human rights abuses while doing nothing to prevent climate change. This project is not just dangerous greenwashing, it’s blood carbon and we need to stop it.
