NAIROBI — Indigenous pastoralist communities in northern Kenya are pushing back against a renewed attempt by the Northern Rangelands Trust (NRT) to revive its troubled Northern Kenya Grassland Carbon Project (NKGCP), the world’s largest soil-carbon offset scheme, after two suspensions by the carbon credit certifier Verra and a damaging court ruling against the conservation group.
According to Survival International, the Indigenous rights organisation that has tracked the project for years, Maasai and Rendille residents of the Leparua and Melako conservancies say NRT field staff have been pressing them to sign new community agreements without adequately explaining their contents. Rose Orguba, a member of the Melako Conservancy’s community land management committee, told the group that attendees bussed in for signing meetings were told that the funds tied to the project’s carbon revenue would be lost if they did not sign that same day — a tactic she said exploited the fact that roughly nine in ten residents cannot read. Jackson Lokadelio, a Leparua Conservancy resident, said the community does not understand what it is being asked to agree to and worried that signing without comprehension could amount to giving away their land.
Survival International’s director, Caroline Pearce, accused NRT of using “tricks and dishonest dealings” and called for Verra to permanently shut the project down.
NRT had not issued a public response to the specific allegations at the time of writing.
A project already on the ropes
The NKGCP spans more than 1.9 million hectares of pastoralist rangeland across Samburu, Isiolo, Laikipia and Marsabit counties — an area larger than the whole of Kenya’s Vihiga and several other counties combined — and generates carbon credits by paying herding communities to alter traditional grazing patterns so that grasslands store more carbon in the soil. Launched in 2012 and marketed as a Triple Gold-rated, Verified Carbon Standard project, it has sold credits to corporate buyers including Meta, Netflix, NatWest and British Airways. The Wall Street Journal has reported that NRT has sold more than 6 million credits worth an estimated $42 million to $90 million.
The project’s credibility has been under sustained pressure since March 2023, when Survival International published a report, “Blood Carbon,” arguing that NRT’s carbon accounting could not reliably measure additional storage and that its monitoring relied on flawed self-reported data. Verra suspended credit issuance that year, then lifted the suspension eight months later after a review that, according to Survival and other critics, failed to resolve the underlying concerns.
A second and more serious blow came in January 2025, when a three-judge bench of Kenya’s Environment and Land Court in Isiolo ruled, in a case brought by 165 community members, that two of NRT’s largest conservancies — Biliqo Bulesa and Cherab — had been established on unregistered community land without proper public participation, making them unconstitutional. Biliqo Bulesa alone generates around a fifth of the carbon credits produced across the whole project, and analysts say the ruling’s reasoning could apply to roughly half of the other participating conservancies, even though they were not named in the suit. The court also barred NRT’s armed ranger units from operating in the affected areas. NRT’s appeal, and a bid to stay the ruling, were both rejected, and in May 2025 Verra suspended the project for a second time, citing the litigation directly. The project remains on hold.
A disputed human rights record
Survival International’s press release ties the new agreements to longstanding allegations that NRT rangers have been involved in violence, killings, forced disappearances and intimidation of community members. That record is genuinely contested. A 2021 report by the U.S.-based Oakland Institute first alleged that NRT-linked rangers were connected to the deaths of more than 70 Borana herders in the Biliqo Bulesa conservancy, but an independent review commissioned by The Nature Conservancy, one of NRT’s own funders, found no evidence supporting those specific allegations, while acknowledging the conservancy’s 2007 founding had been driven by a narrow group of community leaders close to NRT. NRT’s chief executive, Tom Lalampaa, has repeatedly denied the violence claims, saying the organisation “has never, will never, and does not have the legal authority to arm anyone,” including its rangers, and that no staff member has ever been charged in connection with such allegations. A 2024 Conflict Sensitivity Analysis commissioned by NRT and conducted by Saferworld reportedly did not turn up evidence of abuses, and the chairman of the Melako conservancy publicly disowned similar claims made in a 2025 documentary, calling them an attempt to sabotage the project.
On the other hand, a July 2025 report by Avocats Sans Frontières and the International Federation for Human Rights, based on fieldwork in Isiolo County, documented what it described as systemic harassment by security forces, restricted land access, and reports of abductions and extrajudicial killings affecting pastoralist communities, and said human rights defenders speaking out against NRT have faced retaliatory legal harassment. No criminal prosecutions of NRT rangers are known to have resulted from any of these allegations.
An organisation in turmoil
The push for new community agreements comes as NRT faces wider institutional strain. The group’s founder, Ian Craig, departed last year following a public and acrimonious dispute with its board. USAID, historically one of NRT’s largest donors, ended its funding earlier this year amid broader cuts to U.S. foreign assistance. NRT has said the court ruling and subsequent funding uncertainty caused “unprecedented shock” among donors, with tens of millions of shillings in committed project funding reportedly at risk.
For its part, NRT maintains that the legal dispute concerns only how specific conservancies were formed, not the technical validity of the carbon project itself, and says the NKGCP continues to operate, remains compliant with Verified Carbon Standard requirements, and has not been invalidated by any court decision. The new agreements communities are now being asked to sign appear to be an attempt to bring the project into line with Kenya’s Climate Change (Amendment) Act 2023, the Climate Change (Carbon Market Regulations) Act 2024, and the Community Land Act 2016 — legislation passed partly in response to the legal uncertainty the project has run into. Survival International, by contrast, says the draft agreements it has reviewed would tighten restrictions on herders, add new layers of decision-making, and redirect a larger share of future carbon revenue to county authorities, entrenching rather than resolving the communities’ loss of control over their own land.
NRT has not disclosed how many of its 22 participating conservancies have agreed to the revised terms. Verra has not indicated when, or whether, its review of the project will be completed.
