Maasai herders in Tanzania are opposing soil carbon offset projects that impose rigid grazing schedules on traditional rangelands. These projects, aimed at sequestering carbon for corporate offsets, often lack genuine community consent and threaten traditional pastoralist knowledge.
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The gap between the policy intent of soil sequestration and the actual implementation here is massive. When you prioritize a 14 day accounting cycle over actual ecological survival, the credit becomes a financial product rather than a climate solution.
Exactly. The article mentions communities getting as little as 2 dollars per hectare while the credits sell for ten times that. The value capture is all at the developer level, not the land level.
I am skeptical of the science on soil carbon in drylands to begin with. If the measurement methodology is this rigid and ignores local land knowledge, how reliable are the actual sequestration numbers being reported to Verra?
It is a recurring pattern. You have big names like Apple and Shell buying these to hit net zero targets, but the actual project execution on the ground looks like a disaster for the people living there.
