Northern Kenya Grassland Carbon Project — Satellite Data Exposed Over-Crediting, Triggering Two Verra Suspensions

Launched by the Northern Rangelands Trust (NRT) in 2013 and issuing its first credits from 2021, the Northern Kenya Grassland Carbon Project applied a Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) rangeland-management methodology across 13 conservancies covering roughly 1.9 million hectares, part of NRT's wider ~4 million-hectare conservancy network spanning nearly 10% of Kenya's land area. The project claimed that training pastoralist communities in rotational “planned grazing” would raise soil carbon storage, marketing credits projected to remove 50 million tonnes of CO2 over 30 years, and — by some counts becoming the world's largest soil-carbon offset project — won a Triple Gold rating at COP27 in 2022.

Verra opened a Section 6 quality-control review on 10 March 2023 after third-party validators raised 114 separate issues, including livestock-movement and grazing records that did not match independent satellite vegetation-loss data, grazing maps inconsistent with observed vegetation change, and record-keeping discrepancies — one conservancy's reported livestock count varied by roughly 40,000 goats between documents. A parallel investigation by Survival International, published the same month, argued the credited “planned grazing” model could not reliably demonstrate either the herding-practice changes or the carbon removals it claimed, and raised concerns about free, prior and informed consent among the pastoralist communities involved.

By August 2024 the project had already sold 6,193,393 credits to corporate buyers including Netflix, Meta, NatWest, Kering, Salesforce, Beiersdorf and the LA Clippers. In January 2025, a Kenyan court ruled that two participating conservancies — including Biliqo Bulesa, which generates about 20% of the project's credits — had been established unconstitutionally, without adequate community consultation. Verra again placed the project on hold while NRT appealed, then subsequently reinstated it, leaving its long-term carbon accounting and community-consent status contested.

The case is included here as a cautionary example: satellite monitoring correctly flagged inconsistencies between the project's self-reported activity data and observed land conditions, but this exposed weaknesses in the underlying carbon-accounting methodology and community-consent process rather than demonstrating a validated ecosystem-service outcome.

Read the full analysis: https://illuminem.com/illuminemvoices/kenyan-soil-carbon-project-suspended-for-a-second-time