Community Benefit-Sharing Agreements for Carbon Projects in Kenya

Kenya’s carbon credit sector has grown quickly, and much of it sits on land communities hold under customary tenure rather than individual title. Soil carbon and rangeland restoration projects linked to the Northern Rangelands Trust, forestry offsets, and blue carbon schemes on the coast all depend on access to community land. The legal question is not only whether a project is technically sound, but whether the community holding the land has lawfully consented and will see a fair share of the revenue. Kenya now has statutory answers to both, in the Climate Change (Amendment) Act, 2023, the Climate Change (Carbon Markets) Regulations, 2024, and the Community Land Act, 2016. This article sets out what the law requires, where it is silent, and what the Northern Kenya Rangelands Carbon Project dispute shows about the gap between paper compliance and practice.

Three Statutes, Not One

Carbon projects on community land sit at the intersection of three legal regimes, and developers who treat this as one approval process tend to miss something. The Climate Change (Amendment) Act, 2023 amended the parent Climate Change Act, 2016 to introduce a formal carbon trading framework, including a National Carbon Registry and a requirement that land-based projects enter into community development agreements. The Climate Change (Carbon Markets) Regulations, 2024, made under that Act, fill in the operational detail: how a project is approved by the Designated National Authority, what a community development agreement must contain, and how revenue is shared. Neither instrument says how to identify who speaks for a community, or how it binds itself to an agreement. That is the function of the Community Land Act, 2016, which governs community land registration and the decision a community must take to validly consent to any arrangement. An agreement signed with the wrong people is vulnerable to challenge however compliant the carbon paperwork looks. We cover the wider carbon markets framework, including registration and crediting mechanics, in a separate article on this site, so this piece focuses on land and community.

The Benefit-Sharing Rule: 40 Percent for Land-Based Projects

The 2024 Regulations set an express, quantified benefit-sharing floor, unusual by regional standards. A carbon project on public or community land must make an annual social contribution calculated on aggregate earnings from the previous year, less the cost of doing business. For land-based projects, meaning those tied to agriculture, forestry, rangelands, soil carbon and similar activities, that contribution must be at least 40 percent of net earnings. For non-land-based projects, such as energy or industrial process credits, the figure is at least 25 percent. Projects entirely on private land are exempt. The delivery mechanism is the community development agreement, required for any project on public or community land, setting out anticipated benefits and how the contribution will be disbursed. The Regulations also contemplate a Community Development Agreement Committee to oversee distribution, drawing on local government, elders, women and youth, precisely because a single figurehead negotiating for an entire community is where these arrangements have historically gone wrong.

Consent: What the Community Land Act Requires

A community development agreement is only as good as the consent behind it, and this is where developers most often get the process wrong. Community land is not ownerless, nor available for informal negotiation with whichever elders or brokers happen to be accessible. Under the Community Land Act, 2016, land is registered in the name of the community itself, with a Community Land Registrar responsible for registration and for maintaining a register of members. The community acts through a community assembly of all its adult members, which elects a management committee of seven to fifteen people for day-to-day administration. Agreements with investors specifically require approval from at least two-thirds of adult members at a community assembly meeting, with a quorum of two-thirds of adult membership. A developer therefore needs to confirm, before treating any signature as binding, that the land is registered community land, that the signatories are properly constituted committee office holders, and that the assembly actually approved the agreement at that threshold, not merely discussed it with a subset of leaders.

FPIC: Voluntary Standard Meets Kenyan Regulation

Free, Prior and Informed Consent, or FPIC, is best known internationally as a requirement of voluntary carbon registries such as Verra and Gold Standard, and of international instruments on indigenous peoples’ rights. It matters to be precise here, since the two are often conflated. The 2024 Regulations have imported FPIC directly into Kenyan law: it must be documented for all community land-based carbon projects, and the standard agreement template calls for evidence FPIC was obtained before project design began. For Kenyan projects this is no longer purely a voluntary registry standard, it is a documented legal requirement, sitting alongside, but distinct from, the community assembly approval the Community Land Act requires. A developer must satisfy both, and an agreement without a genuine, well-documented FPIC process is exposed on either front.

What the Northern Kenya Rangelands Project Shows

The Northern Kenya Rangelands Carbon Project, a large soil carbon initiative spanning conservancies linked to the Northern Rangelands Trust, is the most prominent illustration of how these requirements can fail in practice, though it predates the current Regulations. Following a 2023 report by Survival International, Verra suspended credit issuance pending review, amid concerns that pastoralist communities had not genuinely given FPIC, and about how carbon revenue was distributed at community level. Reporting on the dispute alleges that project information was not adequately shared in local languages, that only a small proportion of members were meaningfully consulted, and that much of the money reaching communities was subject to conditions limiting the community’s own control over its use. The Trust has disputed aspects of this account. We flag this as reported controversy, not a judicial finding, but it makes a real point: a benefit-sharing percentage on paper, even one meeting the statutory 40 percent floor, does not by itself satisfy FPIC or the Community Land Act consent procedure if the underlying process was not genuinely representative.