Restoring Land and Renewing Hope Through Carbon Solutions in Africa

How do people decide whether to participate in carbon projects, and what supports their continued leadership throughout the process?

TNC’s approach is grounded in Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC), treated not as a one-time agreement but as a continuous, participatory process. As a key part of project design, all rights holders - including those with customary land rights - are identified, the potential impacts of the project are discussed and people are explicitly told participation is optional. FPIC requires they receive information however they understand it best, and retain the right to withhold or withdraw consent if any conditions they set are not met.

Engagement is all about full transparency around expected risks, benefits, responsibilities and costs. Trained facilitators who speak local languages and are familiar with cultural norms lead community consultations, including in local languages. Smaller breakout group meetings, for example with women or younger people, ensure full and comfortable participation. No-one exaggerates benefits or offers incentives, rather communities come to understand if and how the project might meet their needs. Burdens they might face, such as shifts in grazing patterns or disputes arising from mapping project boundaries, are openly discussed. Many of these ideas are rooted in traditional ecological knowledge, and facilitators work to contextualise the proposed activities within known cultural systems.

Decisions are best made through recognised institutions representing local communities, like Tanzania’s Village General Assemblies or Community Land Management Committees in Kenya. Discussions must be open to all adults, including women, youth and other underrepresented groups, and must meet whatever locally-mandated quorum requirements exist. Processes and decisions are documented. Communities co-design projects, and if expectations make a proposal unviable, it won’t proceed. After initial consultations, people may approve the project, reject it or request further information before deciding. Exit clauses in agreements let them pull out if terms are breached. 

All project partners undergo human rights due diligence and training in ethical engagement, with partnership agreements embedding safeguarding standards. TNC staff observe early consultations to ensure processes follow international human rights norms, and a formal grievance mechanism allows concerns to be raised, including anonymously, with escalation routes where needed. TNC continually adapts its approach based on community feedback and evolving legal frameworks, supported by its Human Rights Guide and Environmental and Social Safeguard Framework. A new monitoring dashboard will track safeguards, commitments and grievances to help ensure community authority and consent remain central throughout the project lifecycle.

How does TNC promote transparency, accountability, and trustworthy governance in carbon projects, including contracts, leadership representation, and revenue flows?

Governance structures should be rooted in the communities themselves and remain open to scrutiny. By working through recognised customary or statutory institutions and supporting decision-making in public rather than behind closed doors, TNC aims to promote transparency. When such institutions need organization or structure, TNC supports locally led efforts to develop them. TNC actively monitors power dynamics to reduce the risk of elite capture - where leaders might prioritise projects or make decisions without broad consultation - and if anything suggests exclusion or misrepresentation, any community member, not only leaders, can use grievance mechanisms to raise concerns.

Project agreements are community-owned documents. They set out roles and responsibilities for everyone involved, and set expectations. They are typically long-term, sometimes up to 40 years, because carbon standards need emissions reductions to be permanent, which needs a long-term commitment to managing land. Agreements can be amended and renegotiated as social or environmental conditions change. Agreements are drafted in accessible language - such as Swahili - and fully explained before community representatives sign them. The local community keeps a copy, as do others involved in the project, local and national governments, and national or international carbon registries such as Verra.

Local groups representing communities take the lead in overseeing how the project is implemented and how revenue is used, while project partners manage the technical reporting and step in to support if asked. Community-appointed coordinators report on field activities such as grazing plans and land management. To ensure credibility, all carbon projects undergo independent audits by accredited Validation and Verification Bodies (VVBs), which verify that reported outcomes match observed results and make their findings publicly available.

Do carbon projects threaten indigenous land rights or impose new ways of life? 

TNC’s carbon projects are built to strengthen, not replace, community control of land. Claims that carbon projects require external control of indigenous land misunderstand the model. TNC does not manage or police land: all land-use decisions remain with established local bodies such as village assemblies, grazing committees or land management councils. External control would be neither legitimate nor sustainable. Carbon projects depend on people voluntarily committing to practices they believe will improve their land and livelihoods. In many cases, projects need communities to secure tenure over their land, which helps cement their rights, and they support participatory land use planning and stronger governance. 

Most of what’s involved in rangeland carbon projects, such as planning where and when to graze livestock, setting aside some grazing and moving herds, are rooted in long-standing traditional Indigenous pastoralist knowledge. Modern pressures like land privatisation or shrinking grazing corridors tend to be what drives changes to those traditional approaches, rather than the dictates of any carbon project. Through FPIC-based co-design, communities shape practices using their own knowledge, supported by science, technical advice and financial incentives. 

Safeguards exist to prevent land conflict or exclusion. Any land mapping or registration process must follow national law with additional safeguards where needed, and would usually involve neighbouring communities to reduce the risk of disagreement. Human rights risk assessments inform project design, and mitigation strategies and action plans are built in when they start operating. Grievance channels allow communities to raise concerns safely with clearly-defined resolution approaches.

TNC also invests in leadership and negotiation capacity - such as through the African Conservation Leadership Network - equipping communities to engage more confidently with external actors over time.

How are benefits from carbon projects shared, and what ensures those benefits are shared equitably and effectively with local communities?

A common criticism is that communities do not receive a fair share of carbon revenues, despite it being their land and stewardship that make the project possible. This concern is valid. Historically, benefit-sharing was expressed as fixed percentage splits of gross revenue, but this can obscure the very different costs borne by different parties and the fact that these costs do not remain constant over the life of a project.

Project developers cover substantial upfront expenses for certification, monitoring, finance and project management. Communities, often with support from NGOs like TNC, bear the substantial and often under-recognised costs of running the project, including labour, coordination, training and field operations. Then there are opportunity and social costs the community bears in opting to change how they use their land. These community contributions are not one-off: they continue for the duration of the project. For a carbon project to succeed long term, all costs must be listed and approved by everyone involved - both when the initiative starts and then continuously as it runs – and then met. 

Then the surplus revenue - effectively, the initiative’s profit - should be shared according to mechanisms designed and approved collectively. This process must recognise that communities are not passive recipients of the benefits of the initiative, but core decision-makers without whose participation there would be no project and no benefits. Increasingly, projects TNC supports are managed by entities or companies the community owns themselves, giving them greater control and helping build long-term local capacity.

Looking ahead, TNC supports the shift toward benefit-sharing models that better reflect the fact that developer and technical costs are typically front-loaded and decrease over time, while project implementation and community stewardship is continuous. Fairness requires that community contributions be valued as a form of co-investment deserving of increasing returns over time. FPIC provides communities with the right to challenge, renegotiate or withdraw from arrangements they consider inequitable. Increasingly, states such as Kenya and Tanzania are beginning to embed minimum thresholds for community revenue in national law, signalling a growing recognition that communities must receive a meaningful and protected portion of carbon revenues.

Decisions on how communities use the income they have earned should be made through existing local governance structures where they exist. For example, in northern Tanzania, village councils allocate funds according to development plans approved in village assemblies. In some cases, local institutions may need strengthening to ensure equity and transparency, and TNC supports locally led efforts to achieve that.

Beyond financial benefits, carbon projects also improve the health of the rangelands they operate on, increase livestock productivity and resilience to drought reducing losses, and generate social gains through stimulating rural economies and providing local jobs. These ‘co-benefits’ tend not to appear in balance sheets but they contribute materially to community welfare.

How are rules enforced in these projects, and what happens if there are allegations of abuse or inappropriate enforcement by rangers or authorities?

These projects require people to choose to make changes in how they currently manage their land, which means following a set of agreed rules. Enforcing those is rooted in community governance rather than external policing, which is ethical and equitable as well as effective. Project rules - such as agreed grazing rotations or set-aside areas - are typically monitored by local entities like grazing committees, composed of community members themselves. When breaches occur, such as unauthorised grazing in restricted zones, they are addressed through community-agreed sanctions or fines rather than force. Traditional systems of accountability and peer oversight are central to compliance, and there are no rangers or armed law enforcement units deployed specifically to enforce carbon-related rules.

TNC does not employ, equip, command or deploy ranger units for carbon enforcement. Some partners involved in broader conservation work may engage in law enforcement related to wildlife protection or livestock conflicts. Where TNC funding is involved in such contexts, partners are required to meet human rights due diligence standards and follow TNC’s safeguards and contractual stipulations. 

Where credible allegations of abuse arise involving a partner organization or activities supported by TNC, a structured response process is triggered. This includes immediate engagement with the implementing partner to verify facts, assess risks and ensure appropriate investigation and remedy measures are initiated. In line with TNC’s human rights due diligence commitments, these steps are closely monitored to ensure accountability and protection for affected individuals or communities.

Grievance mechanisms allow affected individuals or communities to raise concerns, which would be reviewed and escalated through appropriate internal and external channels. Grievances can be raised through community channels or directly with project staff, using formats accessible to different groups (e.g., verbal, written, anonymous).

Why engage in these sorts of carbon projects when they seem to attract controversy? How can you be sure of their integrity? 

In carbon markets’ early years, regulation was weak, social safeguards were inconsistently applied, and some developers treated communities as passive beneficiaries rather than equal partners. These concerns have driven substantial reforms across the sector. Governments are now introducing clearer regulatory frameworks, standards bodies are strengthening requirements for community engagement and benefit-sharing, and demand for independently certified ‘high-quality’ credits has increased accountability.

TNC contributes to this shift by applying its internal ‘bar of excellence’ for supply-side integrity, embedding robust human rights safeguards, FPIC, fair benefit-sharing, and transparent governance. Scientifically, carbon accounting methodologies have improved significantly with emerging science, some of it developed with TNC support. New approaches like dynamic baselines have now been endorsed by IC-VCM, the global regulator of carbon markets, as one of the best ways to do these types of projects. New digital soil-mapping tools are enhancing monitoring accuracy while reducing costs. All credits must be independently validated and verified by accredited third-party auditors who assess actual results rather than projected outcomes.

Waiting for a “perfect” system would delay critical climate action, particularly in places where livelihoods are already badly affected, and poverty and environmental damage growing. Carbon projects are held to even higher standards than typical conservation initiatives, often requiring three or more years of consultation and design. The scale of funding they bring into rural areas can be transformative which makes strong safeguards essential. When they are well-governed, these projects can bring significant benefits to people and nature. Engaging now enables us to help shape future standards, drive continual improvement, and direct carbon finance to support communities to continue to manage their land sustainably.