One of the tech industry’s sources of carbon credits is in conflict with Kenyan herders

A conservation program in Kenya that tech companies like Netflix and Meta rely on for carbon credits is in conflict with local herders, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. The issue led to the program run by The Northern Kenya Rangelands Carbon Project to be put on hold, and could ultimately invalidate credits the organization has already sold.

This specific carbon capture program uses grass spread across 4.7 million acres of land communally owned by groups like the Maasai, to trap carbon in the soil. The project gets to use the land, and in exchange, the herders get a portion of the revenue from carbon credit sales. The issue that’s put the whole program at risk is a conflict over the herders’ farming practices. The local agricultural community has used the same grazing techniques for generations without issue, but the Northern Kenya Rangelands Carbon Project wants them to “rotate livestock grazing so grasses can recover and lock more carbon into the soil,” The Wall Street Journal writes. Some herders frustrated with the rules have gone as far as to claim that they were misled when they originally agreed to participate in the conservation program.

Many tech companies rely on purchasing carbon credits to help offset the negative environmental impacts of rapid technological development. You don’t get to run servers streaming movies or training AI models 24 hours a day without consuming a lot of electricity and water. Carbon offset projects plant trees or run agricultural programs like the one in Kenya to pull carbon from the atmosphere, selling credits to companies to absolve them of their sins.

Clearly, these carbon projects haven’t always been actually beneficial for the people who live on the land they impact. The Wall Street Journal report is worth a read and gets into what the fallout of all of this could be, but at the very least, tech companies’ branding themselves as “carbon neutral” seems like its going to get trickier.