Kariba, a deliberately manufactured 'scandal'

💡 This article is featured in The Definitive Reading List: illuminem’s Recommended Sustainability Classics

Fifteen years ago, northern Zimbabwe was in free fall. The country's fast-track land reforms under Robert Mugabe had severely impacted agricultural production.

Communities faced land disputes, hyperinflation, droughts, floods, and an HIV/AIDS crisis that hollowed out rural livelihoods. Forests were vanishing fast.

Against this backdrop, in 2011, a small company called Carbon Green Investments (CGI) decided to try something new.

With technical and financial support from South Pole, CGI launched one of the world's first REDD+ projects — the Kariba project — under Verra's then brand-new VM0009 Methodology for Avoided Ecosystem Conversion.

The timing was awful. Global carbon markets had collapsed after the failure of the Kyoto Protocol, leaving projects such as Kariba with carbon prices below $1 a tonne of CO2 equivalent (tCO2e).

For a decade, CGI kept the project alive, building schools, clinics, beekeeping ventures, and community gardens, maintaining hundreds of kilometres of roads and implementing early burning and fire suppression work across 100,000s of hectares. Deforestation fell.

The project won several awards. For nearly a decade, the project was regarded as a flagship initiative — a pioneer in carbon-backed forest conservation.

That changed abruptly in 2023, when the Kariba project, along with most other REDD+ projects, was thrust into the headlines as a "carbon scandal".

Baseless accusations

First, journalists claimed that Verra's VM0009 methodology had overstated the baseline deforestation, implying that the impact of those projects registered under Verra was exaggerated.

Second, South Pole, as the carbon developer for the project, was accused of profiting excessively from selling Verified Carbon Units (VCUs).

Third, the project itself faced allegations of poor management, a lack of a paper trail to document benefit sharing, and even accusations of trophy hunting.

Two years later, Verra's newly released review tells a different story.

Let's first look at carbon accounting. Verra issued 26.8 million VCUs in accordance with its VM0009 methodology.

After applying the required ex-post corrections using the now-available data — as instructed by the methodology — the Kariba project produced 13.6 million tCO2e of emission reductions in the period July 1, 2011 to June 30, 2021.

Some 2.0 million tCO2e were assigned to the buffer pool, a joint insurance in case emission reductions in one project would later turn out to be smaller than anticipated.

Since the last verified period ended on June 30, 2021, Kariba is estimated to have avoided an additional 5.8 million tCO2e, bringing the total reductions to approximately 20 million tCO2e.

In addition to this, independent analysis by Chloris Geospatial revealed further significant amounts of uncounted CO2 reductions in the form of carbon removals.

In short, the Verra methodology was applied correctly. Verra's correction procedures did precisely what they were designed to do in the methodology.

Had the project proponent CGI not withdrawn the project from Verra in light of the media attacks, the true-up period would have started on July 1, 2021, and no further VCUs would have been issued by Verra until the avoided emissions in the reference area reached the VCUs issued against the original baseline.

The supposed "scandal" was, in reality, a standard process foreseen by the Verra methodology.

The issue with Verra's VM0009 was, however, that the methodology's period for baseline resetting was rather long, spanning over 10 years.

Furthermore, its ex ante deforestation models tended to overestimate the baseline emissions in cases where deforestation in the host country decreased, for any reason, after a REDD+ project commenced, creating a risk of significant ex post corrections, which is precisely what happened in the Kariba case.

In response, Verra replaced VM0009 with the more conservative VM0048 Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation methodology.

Profit myth

The idea that South Pole "cashed in" on Kariba crumbles in light of the facts.

For nearly a decade, the company purchased and held Kariba VCUs when few others were willing to take the risk.

In doing so, South Pole helped sustain the Kariba forest protection project and its positive environmental impact through a period of market disinterest.

When the market rebounded in 2021-2022, the company briefly benefited from the increased value of its holdings; however, it also reinvested heavily in additional projects at the same time.

Following the 2023 market downturn, Kariba became one of South Pole's largest losses. That's not profiteering, that's impact investing.

Bigger picture

Operating in remote, economically fragile, and politically volatile regions presents challenges, whether for the Kariba project or any similar endeavour.

However, despite all the criticism, the Verra review confirms that Kariba remains one of the world's largest verified carbon initiatives, having reduced more than 13.6 million tCO2e by June 2021, according to the Verra review (not even counting the carbon removal in the project), and millions more since then.

For perspective: As of October 2025, the entire worldwide engineered carbon removal industry has delivered roughly 930,000 tonnes of CO2, according to cdr.fyi.

Kariba alone has reduced at least fifteen times that amount.

Real battle

So why, then, was such a project, one that demonstrably cut emissions and supported rural livelihoods, attacked so fiercely?

Kariba became a lightning rod not because of wrongdoing, but because of ideology.

A small but vocal chorus of critics rejects the idea of carbon certificates altogether. Their arguments are fundamental:

• Offsetting by companies and other organisations enables greenwashing and delays emission cuts and must therefore be rejected, irrespective of the quality of the project;
• Nature should not be commodified or "priced";
• Market-based tools cannot fix climate change when capitalism is the very system that caused climate change; and
• Emissions should be cut at home, not in distant countries.

Each argument holds a measure of truth.

Yet, as one of the earliest and largest carbon projects globally, with VCUs sold to numerous prominent voluntary buyers and operating in an exceptionally complex environment, the Kariba project became an easy target for those seeking to illustrate the flaws of carbon markets.

But turning these criticisms into dogma risks undermining one of the few mechanisms that has successfully directed substantial private finance toward climate mitigation where it is most needed: the Global South.

The Kariba controversy was never really about a project in Zimbabwe.

It was about a larger struggle over how to fight climate change: through markets, or somehow against them.

This article is also published on Quantum Commodity Intelligence. illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability & Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

See how the companies in your sector perform on sustainability. On illuminem’s Data Hub™, access emissions data, ESG performance, and climate commitments for thousands of industrial players across the globe.