To date, 52 countries in the global South have been targeted by these projects. Half the projects are in just four countries: China, India, Brazil and Colombia, which are developing their own industries of carbon project developers. But projects in these countries account for less than a third of the total land area involved. The most affected region, in terms of land area, is Africa, with projects covering over 5.2 million hectares.[14]

Many of the projects involve land deals to set up giant eucalyptus, acacia or bamboo plantations. Typically, these are pasture lands or savannahs that were used until now by local communities for grazing livestock or growing food.

An even larger number of projects are implemented on small farms. Typically, in these cases, farmers must show proof that they have title over the lands and are asked to sign contracts in which they commit to plant and maintain a number of trees on a portion of their land. According to these contracts, farmers transfer the rights to the carbon in the trees and in the soil to the project proponents. While these deals do not displace farmers from their lands, they are a form of contract production. Farmers are effectively ceding control over a portion of their lands to an outside company for decades. They can no longer do what they want on the land. The projects can also encourage, and in some cases directly facilitate, a shift from collective forms of land management to privatised, individual property. (See Box 2: Carbon colonialism)

The money that investors plan to capture from these deals is immense. The projects we pulled from the Verra and Gold Standard registries alone will generate 2.5 billion carbon credits (1 credit = 1 tonne of CO2 removed) over their lifetime. With an average price of about US$10 per credit, that adds up to a potential bounty of US$25 billion.[15]

Here come the “idiots”

While these projects are exclusively set up in rural areas with extremely low emissions per capita, it is quite the opposite when it comes to the companies orchestrating the projects. With the exception of what’s happening in India and China, most carbon projects are led by foreign companies in rich countries with atrocious emissions records — such as the Netherlands, the US, Singapore, Switzerland, the UK, France, Germany and the UAE.[16] There is a clear colonial dynamic at work, with companies and big NGOs from the North once again using the lands of communities in the global South for their own agendas and their own benefit.

A good number of actors driving this new wave of land grabs are in fact repeat offenders from the global farmland grab that took off a decade and a half ago. This is especially the case in Africa. (See Box 3: Africa’s land grabbers are back in business) There are also several companies from the forestry sector with histories of land grabbing and conflicts with local communities. Much of the vast eucalyptus plantations of Brazilian paper giant Suzano, for example, which is involved in three large-scale carbon plantation projects, have been grabbed from Brazil’s indigenous and traditional peoples.[17] And a non-negligible number of project developers have records of illegal dealings and financial scandal. They include:

• Ricardo Stoppe Jr, Brazil’s “carbon king”, who was arrested in June 2024 for running an illegal carbon credit sale and land grabbing scheme;[18]
• Martin Vorderwulbecke, a German businessman with a neem tree carbon project in Paraguay, who is accused of defrauding Slovenia’s national airline of millions of dollars;[19]
• Alexis Ludwig Leroy, a French/Swiss carbon trader developing tree planting projects in Côte d’Ivoire and the Democratic Republic of Congo, who is reportedly under investigation for money laundering and financial connections to Colombia’s “queen of cocaine”;[20]
• Vittorio Medioli, an Italian/Brazilian businessman and politician with a carbon tree plantation in Brazil, who was convicted in Brazilian courts for currency evasion and sued for cartel and gang formation in the transport sector;[21] and,
• Sheikh Ahmed Dalmook al Maktoum, a member of the UAE royal family seeking tens of millions of hectares in Africa for carbon offset projects, who is accused of overcharging Ghana on the supply of Russian-made Covid vaccines and who is advised on his African carbon deals by an Italian businessman convicted for a bankruptcy fraud that sank one of Italy’s largest telecommunications companies.[22]

The money being hustled by these carbon cowboys comes mainly from the world’s most polluting corporations, who are interested in buying carbon credits to greenwash their emissions. At the top of the list of credit buyers are fossil fuel companies (See Box 4: Tree planting for oil pumping). But there are also tech giants like Meta and Apple, food companies like Danone and Coca-Cola, and supermarket chains like Mercado Libre and Carrefour. Amazon and the philanthropic arms of its billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, are heavily involved, too. Bezos both buys credits and funds the NGOs and companies running the plantations, through initiatives like the AFR100 fund, which aims to plant trees on 100 million hectares in Africa.[23] The same goes for development banks, like FMO of the Netherlands, the US International Development Finance Corporation or the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation, which provide cheap loans, political risk insurance and even equity investments to many carbon plantation companies.

Corporations from the financial sector are also starting to get involved — a worrying sign that much more money could be mobilised. Rabobank and BTG Pactual are leading examples of financial players establishing specialised funds to invest in carbon plantations on behalf of pension funds, billionaires, sovereign wealth funds, university endowments, development banks and other institutional investors. Their investment in carbon plantations dovetails with the landholdings that many of these actors have already amassed through timber and farm land investments.[27]

The Renewable Resources Group, for instance, is a US private equity firm whose investors include Goldman Sachs and the Harvard University endowment. It specialises in “monetising” water by buying up land in parts of the world where it can get access to cheap irrigation to produce high value crops for export, like grapes and berries. It has already acquired over 100,000 ha of agricultural lands in parts of Mexico, the US, Chile and Argentina where there are water scarcity issues.[28] Recently it established a “nature-based solutions” division through which it acquired the German-based private equity fund 12Tree. Since 2017, 12Tree has acquired 20,000 ha in Latin America and Africa to establish “regenerative” farms where it plants trees and generates carbon credits.[29]

Certified scams

One big difference between earlier land grabs for food production and today’s land grab for carbon offsets is that the carbon deals are “certified”. Verra and Gold Standard, two of the top certifiers, are paid large sums of money to ensure that offset projects are done in consultation with local communities, avoid displacing them and even provide them with some benefits. It’s the kind of system that agencies like the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation and the World Bank have long claimed would solve the ills of the global farmland grab.

Yet, our dataset and the growing number of investigations by academics, media and civil society into projects certified by these companies put the lie to such claims.[30] How could anyone expect that a market premised on acquiring lands from rural and indigenous communities in the global South, for the benefit of corporations in the global North, could amount to anything other than a massive land grab? No benefit-sharing mechanism, often baked into these carbon deals, alters that outcome.

And while nine million hectares is already too much, things could get much worse. The UN climate negotiations are moving towards establishing an international carbon trading mechanism that would allow heavy polluting country governments and their companies to offset national emissions through deals for carbon projects in other countries, mainly in the global South.[36] If and when this happens, the value of carbon credits could surge, generating even higher demand for land to plant trees. Pressure is also coming from efforts to establish markets for biodiversity offsets, which will trigger a feeding frenzy among investors eager to make a buck from the territories of small farmers, indigenous peoples and pastoralists.[37]

The idea that planting trees or other means of generating carbon credits can compensate for fossil fuels emissions is a dangerous distraction, incompatible with the real cuts to emissions that are required to deal with the climate crisis.[38] Consider, for instance, that even if the dubious emission removal estimates of the 279 projects in our dataset were true, they would only amount to 55 million tonnes of CO2 per year– not nearly enough to even cover last year’s 90 million tonne increase in global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels.[39]

Social movements and organisations need to be relentless in exposing these contradictions, harms and frauds. We also need to get more information to the communities on the ground. They are often confused by what the project proponents tell them and not exposed about what other communities have experienced. They are almost never informed about how the projects are designed to enable big corporations to keep polluting and how this pollution is connected to the terrible impacts they are suffering from climate change. The hype about the money to be made, under the misnomer of benefit sharing, can create divisions within communities and draw some families into signing contracts they may soon regret. As all these carbon projects are premised on formal land ownership, they can also undermine community systems of land management.

There are already cases where communities have faced violence and intimidation for resisting carbon offset projects and this is only going to escalate. It is therefore becoming increasingly urgent to share information and experiences about the carbon grabs – locally, nationally, regionally and internationally — so we can put a stop to them. The double threat to communities – both from climate change itself and from these criminal solutions to it — should not be allowed to play out.

Thanks to the Data Sciences Institute of the University of Chicago, Linda Pappagallo and Manveetha Muddaluru for their help with the dataset.

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