The Northern Kenya Rangelands Carbon Project managed by the Northern Rangelands Trust, a Kenyan nonprofit, is the world’s largest soil-carbon plan, its boosters say. Launched in 2012, it was designed to preserve some 4.7 million acres of grasslands to lock in carbon on land communally owned by the Maasai, Borana and other pastoralist groups, which is part of a network of protected areas hosting threatened species such as cheetahs, black rhinos and… giraffes.

On May 13, 2025, an international nonprofit , Verra, that certifies carbon credits suspended approval for the project, adding to the questions about the credibility of similar carbon-capture projects and whether they actually benefit the people who live off the land….A spokesperson for the group, Verra, said credits are now on hold as it reviews the program after a long-running dispute between the conservationists who created the rangelands project and local herders, who say the project disrupts grazing patterns built over the course of centuries…

The dispute reached a flashpoint in 2021, when 165 pastoralists from two conservation areas sued the Northern Rangelands Trust in Kenyan court for allegedly using their land without consent. The plaintiffs accused the trust of creating the conservancies—which acted as the herders’ representatives in the carbon deal—through pressure and intimidation rather than informed consent. The court ruled in their favor in January 2025.

Lawyers and rights groups representing pastoralists say the ruling, which applies to one of the biggest conservancies, invalidates around 20% of the entire project’s credits. They say credits in around half of the project’s 14 wildlife conservancies could be vulnerable to similar lawsuits. That could leave big corporations holding invalid offsets and open to charges from rights groups that they overstate their commitment to environmentally friendly practices.

The trust has sold over six million carbon credits, worth between $42 million and $90 million depending on market prices, to buyers including Netflix and Facebook parent Meta. Tech companies use credits to offset emissions from their energy-intensive operations, such as producing movies, running data centers to stream video, powering social media and training cutting-edge artificial-intelligence models, as well as from employee travel. Meta became carbon neutral—that is, it purchased enough credits to compensate for all of its emissions—in 2020, and Netflix followed suit two years later.

Excerpts from Caroline Kimeu, Netflix and Meta’s Carbon Credits Snared in Dispute With Maasai Herders, WSJ, May 13, 2025

See also Kenya: Landmark court ruling delivers devastating blow to flagship carbon offset project