Reconcile | 23 October 2025
The green grab: Is carbon offsetting the new scramble for Africa’s land?
A new wave of large-scale land acquisitions is sweeping the Global South, and Africa is at its heart. This time, it’s not for plantations or mines, but for carbon credits.
According to a 2025 Land Matrix Initiative report, millions of hectares are being acquired for carbon offset projects. In Africa, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Republic of the Congo are epicenters, with over a million hectares each already under contract.
The African Reality: Risk Where Rights Are Weak
The report reveals that the promised benefits for local communities are often an illusion, while the risks to their livelihoods are very real. These losses include:
1. Direct Loss of Land and Access to Resources
The most immediate threat is the loss of land that communities depend on for farming, grazing, and gathering. The report highlights that the land acquired for these projects is “seldom genuinely idle.” It is often ancestral domain used for subsistence.
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and the Republic of the Congo, which are epicenters of this “green grab” with over a million hectares each, weak land governance means customary land rights are easily overridden. The report documents cases where logging concessions were quietly converted into carbon projects without resolving longstanding land conflicts or adequately consulting communities (Deals #3244, #8906).
The Mai-Ndombe Carbon Project in the DRC (Deal #3785), the world’s largest REDD+ project, is a stark case study. Despite being home to over 50,000 people, the project has not formally recognized their customary land rights. Restrictions on traditional land-use practices have forced people, particularly women, to travel longer distances to farm or gather food.
2. The Specific Threat to Pastoralism
The report explicitly notes the risk to pastoralists, whose grazing corridors and dry-season reserves are being fenced off by vast carbon projects.
These projects often target remote rangelands that were previously protected by their inaccessibility. The surge in carbon deals has now made these lands valuable.
When carbon investors fence off land for “protected areas” or large-scale tree planting, they block critical seasonal migration routes. This can lead to:
Loss of access to grazing reserves, especially during droughts.
Increased conflict as herds are compressed into smaller areas.
The destruction of a time-tested climate adaptation strategy that pastoralism represents.
3. Broken Promises on Jobs and Benefits
Carbon projects are often marketed as bringing jobs and community development. The data shows these promises are largely unfulfilled.
Employment is minimal: Avoided-deforestation projects, the most common type in Africa, generate almost no jobs—averaging just 0.08 jobs per 100 hectares. This is often just a handful of forest patrols.
Benefit-sharing is weak and unfair: The dominant carbon standards, like Verra’s VCS, have vague requirements for benefit-sharing. The implementation is left to the discretion of project developers, leading to a major gap between promised and delivered benefits (see Figure 9 in the report). In many cases, communities with customary land rights are excluded from benefit-sharing arrangements because they lack formal, statutory land titles.
4. A New Frontier of Land Inequality
The report concludes that without urgent reform, carbon offsetting risks repeating the injustices of past land rushes. By prioritizing large-scale acquisitions that neglect customary land tenure systems—the very foundation of local livelihoods worldwide—this new “green” sector is exacerbating land concentration and social inequality.
The Path Forward: Protecting Livelihoods
For a just transition that directly addresses these livelihood concerns, the report calls for the need to:
Prioritize Community-Led Projects: Support carbon projects developed by and with Indigenous Peoples and local communities, ensuring they retain ownership and benefits, rather than being displaced by large-scale acquisitions.
Strengthen Land Rights: Accelerate the legal recognition of customary land ownership and pastoralists’ mobility rights.
Demand Transparency and Accountability: Make land contracts and benefit-sharing agreements public so communities can hold developers accountable.
The evidence is clear: the current model of large-scale carbon offsetting is creating a high risk of “green grabbing” in Africa. A truly just climate transition must protect the land rights and livelihoods of the communities who have been stewards of these landscapes for generations.
Read the full executive summary and analysis in the Land Matrix Initiative’s 2025 Analytical Report: