Over the past decade, carbon credits have been touted as one of Africa’s next development frontiers. They offer a way to convert the continent’s vast forests, grasslands, wetlands and mangroves into investable climate assets capable of financing conservation, community livelihoods and sustainable land use.
Many a writer, yours truly included, has gushed about the win/win possibilities for conservation and sustainability while attracting much needed development capital into Africa. It would be a way for Africa to reap some benefit from the fact that it has less industrial production (and consequent environmental pollution) than most other continents.
From Kenya’s rangelands to the Congo Basin’s rainforests and southern Africa’s ambitious animal conservation projects, voluntary carbon offset projects have multiplied, promising to channel into local environmental protection efforts billions of dollars from global corporates seeking to meet their net-zero commitments. Africa has been hailed as both climate custodian and beneficiary, positioned to leverage its natural capital to unlock climate finance at scale.
Triple whammy
Recent events, however, have triggered a reassessment of this narrative. The integrity of carbon credits issued by some global registries has been called into question. Queries have also been raised about issues such as community consent and benefit sharing in some of the largest African carbon credit projects.
These are incredibly negative factors for an industry in which credibility is crucial, and it has led to a retreat by many corporate buyers of these credits. That withdrawal threatens the financing of major forest protection schemes such as the Kasigau Corridor and Chyulu Hills projects in Kenya, the Makame wildlife management area in Tanzania, and many more.
In early 2023, an article appeared as part of an investigation by the UK’s Guardian newspaper, the German weekly Die Zeit, and non-profit investigative journalism outfit SourceMaterial into some Verra-verified projects. Verra is a US-based non-profit that develops and manages standards for sustainable development, climate action and responsible business practices. It operates a number of leading environmental standards, including its Verified Carbon Standard, and has issued more than a billion carbon credits. The organisation has approved as much as 75% of all voluntary offsets in the world.
Doubt has been sown in a field that requires absolute trust
The investigations and subsequent studies found that most of the rainforest offset credits approved did not represent genuine carbon reductions and were likely phantom as much as 90% of the time. According to The Guardian, ‘crucial flaws in the way credits were calculated indicated that the overwhelming majority of forest protection credits approved by Verra massively overstated their impact’. The 2023 report has since been followed by others with similar conclusions, including one published in October 2025 in the respected journal Science.
Verra has denied these claims and announced a review of its carbon credit calculation mechanism. The damage, though, is already done. Doubt has been sown in a field that requires absolute trust. The voluntary carbon credits market has suffered a significant setback.
Prices for many nature-based credits have collapsed, corporate buyers have retreated amid greenwashing concerns, and financing for several high-profile forest protection schemes has slowed or stalled. Projects once seen as models of climate finance success now face legal challenges, regulatory scrutiny and social backlash.
Governance and audit
The issues highlight deep governance weaknesses in Africa’s carbon credit ecosystem. In some countries, the courts have ruled that projects have been launched without adequate community consultation or clear land tenure consent, undermining the principle of free, prior and informed consent. Some revenue-sharing arrangements have been found to be opaque, with limited financial benefits to local communities who are typically required to change their ways of life to support the conservation projects.
Weak national regulatory oversight and poor monitoring of social safeguards have amplified these problems, creating reputational risks for carbon credit issuers and buyers alike. The result has been a growing perception that parts of Africa’s carbon market replicate the inequitable extractive patterns of the past: the monetisation of natural assets without ensuring fair community participation or sustainable local development.
Supporting credibility is a project that accountants are made for
To restore market confidence, governments including those of South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria, are now trying to strengthen regulatory frameworks and establish national carbon registries. Frameworks are being designed to improve transparency around project ownership, credit issuance and benefit-sharing arrangements. New policies increasingly emphasise rigorous measurement, reporting and verification standards, legal clarity on land tenure and community consent, and fair revenue allocation mechanisms.
This is a project that accountants are made for. We possess the skills to develop credible systems to audit measurement, reporting and verification standards to ensure they represent what they claim to. These audits could be linked to the recently issued IFRS Sustainability Disclosure Standards (IFRS S1 and S2) to help provide assurance and improve credibility, thereby strengthening the carbon markets.
Turning point
Africa’s carbon market ambitions have reached an inflection point. While the continent remains one of the world’s largest carbon sinks, the present market structure may simply not be good enough to convert that sink into transparent financial flows that deliver tangible development benefits while sustaining the environment and protecting the beautiful planet we all live on.
How Africa navigates this challenge may determine whether carbon markets remain a sustainable source of green development finance or become just another extractive cycle that transfers value out of the continent, leaving local communities with the short end of the stick.
