On a bright September afternoon, around 1,000 Maasai gathered at a school in southern Kenya for an unusual community meeting. As people filed in, a group of women decked out in thick bundles of white beads broke into an exuberant song to set the mood: "We welcome the carbon company that will help us clean the air, protect the atmosphere and has brought us unity!"
The on-theme lyrics, as seen in a video one of the participants took, were celebrating a formal agreement between the Olkeri Maasai community and Soils for the Future Africa, a Kenya-based company that will soon begin distributing millions of dollars for the Maasai to use for new schools, health clinics, infrastructure and other projects of their choosing.
The windfall comes from an innovative way of combining pastoralists' traditional livestock-management practices with recent research on the potential of Africa's grasslands to sequester carbon in soil. If done well, the method reinvigorates poor quality grazing lands with abundant plant life that supports both livestock and wildlife—and aids in the fight against climate change. As they grow, plants capture carbon dioxide through photosynthesis, and when they die, their decomposed roots and tissue deposit their carbon into the soil, where it can stay in place for 100 to 1,000 years.
A 10-year-long pilot program in northern Kenya has been yielding some promising results, says Mark Ritchie, an ecologist at Utah State University and a co-founder of CarbonSolve, a U.S.-based startup that is partnering with Soils for the Future Africa. The pilot project has already succeeded in sequestering 8.5 million tons of carbon dioxide over eight years—roughly the equivalent of the annual emissions of more than 1.8 million cars in the U.S., according to Ritchie's data. (The project's results have not yet been reviewed by independent scientists.)
If the technique lives up to its promise, it could potentially open a new front in the war on climate change that not only reduces atmospheric carbon but also benefits some of the very people who are most vulnerable to its effects. Across much of Africa, changing climate has contributed to widespread degradation of grazing lands, impacting the livelihoods of pastoralists—historically nomadic people who typically graze cattle, sheep and goats—and the well-being of their communities.
Indeed, the Kenyan pastoralists who participated in the soil carbon pilot project have already benefited from the sale of carbon offsets, which are typically bought by companies in wealthy nations to compensate for their own outsized carbon footprints. In its first sale, the project took in around $22 million in carbon credits, of which 60 percent has gone back to communities. "It's like money from heaven," says Dorcas Sanaiyan, a project officer who monitors the social impact of Kenya's soil carbon projects at Converge, a carbon consulting firm in Nairobi. "It's something community members don't have to do anything extra for."
In 30 years, the northern Kenya project alone is projected to generate between $300 and $500 million for communities, says Kieran Avery, director of project development and operations at Native, a U.S.-based company that sells the carbon credits for participating communities. It's up to each community to decide what to spend the funds on "under their own steam, rather than waiting for a donor to come in and fund something," he says.
There are still some challenges to getting the practice into the mainstream. For one thing, the northern Kenya program has run into objections by an advocacy group that has critiqued its methodology and alleged unfair treatment to some of the Kenyans who participated. Avery and his colleagues deny these charges, however, and point out that the project is already making a positive difference for thousands of people.
If scaled across sub-Saharan Africa's vast rangelands—which cover 65 percent of the continent—the soil carbon capture method could eventually become a potent tool for securing the livelihoods of millions of people while simultaneously contributing to the fight against climate change.
"It's taking lands that are degraded and suffering a classic case of tragedy of the commons and turning them into something productive that's incentivized on the back of traditional pastoralism," says Tim Tear, director of the Center for Conservation and Climate Change at the Biodiversity Research Institute, and a co-founder of CarbonSolve. "If any of us fail, we all fail, but if we all do our parts, we all benefit."
Nature's Carbon Bank
Whether you're a pastoralist in Kenya or an office worker in California, the impacts of climate change are increasingly difficult to ignore—as is the urgent need to curtail emissions. A growing number of companies and some countries have set net-zero emissions targets, but these goals usually rely in part on buying carbon offsets. The global market for offsets is currently valued at $2 billion and is projected to reach up to $1 trillion by 2038.
Most carbon offsets involve investing in programs that plant trees or keep existing forests in place. But many of these projects have been criticized as ineffective. As a result, there's now a rising demand for high-quality carbon credits—particularly those involving projects that remove carbon from the atmosphere, rather than just keep it in place, and that also bring benefits for communities and biodiversity.
Soil carbon capture in Africa is a promising target for these programs because it checks all three of these boxes. But it hinges on restoring rangelands. Husbandry practices that tend to be more sedentary than in the past have overgrazed lands across the continent, changing the composition of plants from dense, deep-rooted, leafy perennials like red oat grass, Bermuda grass and carpet grass to sparser annuals that produce just a few leaves and have shallow roots, including bentgrass and purple lovegrass. Annuals sequester about three times less carbon than perennials do, so this ecological shift reduces the amount of carbon deposited into the soil and results in soil carbon depletion over time.
About 10 years ago, Ritchie and some other scientists decided to find out just how much of a carbon deficit overgrazing produced. They found that the soil in Tanzania's Serengeti National Park, where livestock grazing is prohibited, has about 40 tons of carbon per acre, compared to just 12 tons of soil carbon per acre in nearby areas of the same habitat type where grazing is permitted.
Ritchie wondered if this carbon deficit could be turned into an opportunity for both people and the environment. The idea fell into place when he did a study on the effects of grazing on African grasslands. He found that that in certain tropical rangelands, plants actually grow better if they are grazed than if they are left alone. For instance, in the Serengeti, plants increase their productivity by up to 70 percent—meaning they grow faster and bigger—if they undergo moderate levels of grazing. They also store significantly more carbon in the soil, he found, than plants that undergo heavy grazing or no grazing at all.
With these results in hand, Ritchie realized that a simple system of rotational grazing could be applied not only to recover these landscapes, but also to coax them into storing more carbon in the soil. "In reality, what you're doing is simulating migration—like the wildebeest in the Serengeti," he says.
But while the science behind this theory seemed to be sound, a bigger question, he knew, lay ahead: "Can we get people to change how they manage their livestock?"
A Natural Solution
Kenya's rangelands are a difficult place to eke out a living. The sprawling expanses of grasslands can go months without a drop of rain, making agriculture impossible. People there have survived for centuries by practicing nomadic pastoralism. But that lifestyle has become increasingly difficult. Policies implemented under colonization encouraged people to spend at least part of the year in a set location. Limited mobility caused rangeland degradation, which in turn has triggered clashes in some places over scarce resources.
Pastoralist communities today are some of the most marginalized and impoverished in Kenya, and their lives are only becoming harder as climate change worsens. Sakui Maire, a leader of Lekurruki community in northern Kenya, remembers there being plenty of grass for everyone's cattle when he was a child. Over the years, however, the most nutritious species have disappeared, and now there is "massive, massive loss of livestock numbers," he says.
The rotational grazing method for soil carbon storage follows a simple rule of thumb—literally: Livestock should not stay in an area for more than a month, or after the grass gets shorter than the length of a human thumb. The approach places no cap on the number of livestock people can graze, only that they adhere to plans to move their animals around. Communities create their own rotational grazing maps, and grazing coordinators hired from the same community review the plans and alert community leaders when they are not followed.
Working with colleagues from the Northern Rangelands Trust (NRT), a grassroots membership organization that the Lekurruki community belongs to, Ritchie gathered baseline measurements of soil carbon and biodiversity at participating communities. He used the soil carbon data and satellite imagery of vegetation patterns to develop a predictive model of how much carbon could be stored if rotational grazing was implemented. The method accounts for the fact that cattle may wander out of a project area, all of which are unfenced, and it also controls for external factors like rainfall.
By 2014, 14 NRT communities representing around 7,700 square miles of rangelands had joined the project. Fully getting things up and running was a lengthy process, though. "That first stretch involved getting communities organized and coordinating large-scale movements of livestock belonging to at least eight different ethnic groups," Ritchie says.
These efforts paid off in 2019 when Verra, a leading greenhouse gas crediting program, put its imprimatur on the northern Kenya project, opening the door to selling carbon offset credits. The first batch of 3.2 million credits were sold in 2021, with buyers including Meta, British Airways and Salesforce. The sale generated around $22 million, 60 percent of which went to communities, to be spread over three years of payments. The rest of the money covers administrative, monitoring and reporting costs.
The communities decide how to spend their own funds. The Lekurruki community, for example, used their funds to build a dispensary, a primary school and a student dorm, to drill a borehole for water and to repair roads and a tourist airstrip. They also employed several new teachers, paid the tuition fees for some secondary and college students and provided food and stipends to families in need during a record-breaking drought earlier this year. As Maire says, "All that is carbon money."
An Unexpected Setback
By late 2022, the northern Kenya soil carbon project seemed poised for long-term success. It was honored with a prestigious CCB Triple Gold award for benefits to the climate, community and biodiversity, and in a speech at the COP27 climate conference, Kenya's President William Ruto described the project as "exemplary."
Ritchie left northern Kenya in 2021 to focus on expanding the method with Soils for the Future Africa to other parts of Kenya and beyond. He also gathered data that he says verified the method did indeed produce the results that the model had predicted, and that everyone participating was hoping for.
He and his colleagues took measurements at 213 points across the NRT project area and compared them to baseline data collected nearly a decade earlier. They also analyzed several years of satellite imagery to assess whether any changes occurred due to altered livestock grazing. Their findings, which have yet to be peer-reviewed, showed that soil carbon significantly increased in 70 percent of the sampled areas and that 8.5 million tons of CO2 had been removed from the atmosphere.
Vegetation in these areas also increased, and wildlife populations went up, too, including of elephants, lions and endangered Grevy's zebras. The remaining 30 percent of study sites that did not experience a significant uptick in soil carbon corresponded to places where communities did not adhere to their rotational grazing plans. The results confirm that "the model did work over the first eight years of the project, warts and all," says Tear, who is a co-author of the study.
As Ritchie, Tear and colleagues were finalizing these data, Native and the NRT were in the middle of selling the second batch of carbon credits. The sale ground to a halt, however, after the advocacy group Survival International made critical comments to Verra about the northern Kenya project. It published a report, "Blood Carbon," that made sweeping accusations against the project—that its scientific methodologies were flawed, it was inequitable in its distribution of the proceeds, it was contributing to erosion of traditional practices and it was committing human rights abuses. In response to the allegations, Verra put the NRT project on hold to conduct a review.
Simon Counsell, an independent researcher and the report's author, says he reached his conclusions after reading through the project's documentation and spending a couple weeks in Kenya conducting field investigations. "We'd like to see a much more bottom-up approach toward understanding what communities really want there and finding ways they can be funded without cheating the climate, which is what this project is doing," Counsell says. "There has to be a better way."
The NRT denied virtually all of the allegations. "Survival wrote an inaccurate and poorly researched report on the project without ever contacting us or anyone involved with carrying out the project whatsoever," says Mohamed Shibia, the project's director at NRT. "There was no request from them for information, no request for clarifications or comments—no contact whatsoever."
According to Ritchie, the Survival International report presents a fundamental misunderstanding of the soil carbon method, alleging that it did not establish baseline measurements; that it does not account for the fact that livestock can wander out of designated areas; that it does not demonstrate that significant amounts of carbon are added to the soil; and that any carbon that is added won't stay there for long. In fact, the method does cover all of these bases, Ritchie says, otherwise, it would not have passed the original review by Verra and two independent auditors. "The science part of their attack they were just completely wrong about," Ritchie says. "They said all kinds of ridiculous stuff and cited data that contradicted their position."
In November, after an eight month review, Verra announced its findings: The NRT project did conform to the group's verified carbon standards. Effective immediately, the project could once again begin issuing credits.
In a statement, Survival International called Verra's decision a "shocking whitewash." Shibia says he and his colleagues were "vindicated." Verra's decision "confirmed to us what we've known for a long time, that our project is scientifically strong and successfully working to improve a vast landscape, fight against climate change and bring significant benefits to 200,000 community members."
Africa's Testing Ground
The Survival International report did raise one valid point, Ritchie and others say: the importance of making sure people are clearly informed in advance and understand the full scope of carbon projects. While NRT community leaders understood that they were ultimately being paid to increase soil carbon, many of the people they represented were just informed about the grazing strategy.
Partly, this is because the work in northern Kenya was started more than a decade ago, when expectations about informed consent for carbon projects were lower. Educating an entire community also takes more time and resources than project leaders could afford to allocate early on. "Informed consent has been a challenge for projects in the voluntary carbon market in general," Ritchie says. "People tend to skim over the time consuming process of talking with local communities."
The Survival International attack emphasized, though, just how important it is to take this extra step. "As the first project that employed grazing management to increase soil carbon, NRT has had to experience the growing pains of learning how to make it work," Ritchie points out. He, Tear and their colleagues at Soils for the Future Africa have applied those hard-earned lessons and made communication a central pillar of projects they're now launching with communities in southern Kenya and, pending government approval, northern Tanzania.
Before any business agreements are executed, communities are painstakingly informed about what, exactly, the project is seeking to achieve and the science behind it. Explaining the "abstract idea" of how carbon makes it from the atmosphere into the soil tends to be the most challenging part of this process, says Richard Ndaskoi, the project lead at Soils for the Future Africa's Tanzania branch. "If you tell villagers you can earn money out of air, it's a really far-fetched idea."
Drought is something that people understand well, though, so linking the soil carbon explanation to the negative effects people are already experiencing tends to work. So does the fact that the project is essentially paying people to support their culture. "They're actually just giving us a hand in terms of how we're going to manage and utilize our land in the best way possible," says Kenyatta Oloitiptip, general secretary of the grazing committee at Olgulului, a Maasai community in southern Kenya that's partnered with the company. "We won't be doing something new, but doing it professionally."
If successful, the projects that Oloitiptip and others in the region oversee will help to restore degraded grasslands linking several iconic protected areas: Serengeti, Ngorongoro, Amboseli, Kilimanjaro and Tsavo.
Ritchie, Tear, Ndaskoi and their colleagues hope that East Africa is only the beginning. They are already in discussion with potential partners in several other countries, including Zambia, Angola and South Sudan, about introducing soil carbon projects to pastoralist communities there. "We really need to share the lessons we learn so the project gets replicated elsewhere," Ndaskoi says. "Likely, we'll be a testing ground for the rest of Africa."
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