A tale of two carbon land deals assessments

The Land Matrix, a collaboration between the International Land Coalition and several universities, just published a new report on land deals for carbon offsets. Carbon offsets are “credits” sold to polluters who buy them to compensate for their greenhouse gas emissions. The Land Matrix documented 9 million hectares that are subject to these land deals worldwide. GRAIN came to a similar figure when it tallied carbon land deals last year. However, there are some major differences between these two assessments that we want to highlight.

The Land Matrix looked at land deals from the year 2000 onwards. They included projects for avoided deforestation (often known as REDD+) as well as tree planting, wetlands restoration and grasslands management. Two-thirds of the land they accounted for are for REDD+ projects alone. GRAIN, on the other hand, looked at land deals concluded between 2016 and March 2024, and did not include REDD+ or wetlands or grasslands restoration and management. We only looked at projects where lands were taken over to plant trees and other crops to produce carbon offsets for companies.

The Land Matrix data only covers low- and middle-income countries, but excluding China “due to the lack of a country partner”. GRAIN’s data also focused on the global South, but included China — which we learned was one of the top targets for land-based carbon offset projects!

The Land Matrix data set also excludes carbon offset projects where the land claims predate 2000, leaving out some key projects with recent and ongoing conflicts, such as those linked to convicted criminal Ricardo Stoppe, the largest seller of carbon credits in Brazil. UAE firm Blue Carbon’s MOUs for land-based carbon projects in Africa, covering millions of hectares, were also excluded because the land transaction details are not clear.

These differences in data are political. Mainly when it comes to how we perceive carbon offset projects in which communities are contracted to plant and/or keep trees on their lands for a long period of time. It is true that such projects do not involve a company acquiring lands, be it through concessions or sales. The Land Matrix data does not include what it calls “community- or farmer-based projects” as it claims that these do not contribute to land concentration and inequality — but a similar analysis sees it very differently. For GRAIN, these projects, in which villagers sign contracts that give the companies exclusive rights to the carbon in their soils and that commit them to growing and maintaining trees or other crops on their lands for decades, essentially transfers control over the lands to the companies. The villagers, who — from our discussions with them — rarely fully understand what they are signing up to, allocate critical areas of land needed for their families and their communities in order to produce carbon credits to offset the corporate climate pollution. In exchange, they may or may not get some small payments if and when the company manages to sell the carbon credits.

It’s similar to what happens in agriculture. Some people may only consider sales or leases of farmland, without communities’ consent, as land grabs. But contract farming can have the same effect of taking control away from farmers, even if they keep possession of the land.

GRAIN showed the harms caused by these so-called "community or farmer-based” carbon land deals. The Land Matrix, however, provides very little evidence to back up its position. Other than a few, unconvincing studies that they cite, the only clear case of one of these projects providing benefits to communities, according to their report, is a project in Madagascar that the Land Matrix says “ensures the fair distribution of revenues from the sale of carbon credits”.

This project, operated by a French company called iTERAKA, gets groups of farmers to plant trees on their lands to generate carbon credits. The farmers have to sign contracts to participate in the project. One contract, signed between the company and the farmer groups, prohibits participating villagers from talking to journalists or researchers who have not signed an agreement with iTERAKA. The other, signed between the company and each participating villager, requires the villager to care for and maintain the trees on their land for 100 years and cover all costs for planting and maintaining the trees. In exchange, the villager will get 70% of the “net revenues" from any sale of carbon credits produced from their trees, while the other 30% goes to Tereka.

“Net revenues" are what is left over after the French company deducts whatever costs it might have: salaries to its CEO and staff, fees for consultants, business lunches, trips to conferences and whatever else the company decides to include as its “international” expenses. According to the contract, the villagers have no say over these expenditures, which are totally at the discretion of the company. Since it can take years and even decades before carbon credits are generated and sold, iTERAKA will, according to the contract, pay villagers 0.02-0.03 euros per year for each living tree over a year old that is part of the programme. This amount will be deducted from the eventual share of revenues that the villagers might receive.

It seems likely that the Land Matrix researchers did not see the contracts in making their assessment. The reality is that the vast majority of projects of this kind do not make public their contracts with participating farmers. In almost all cases, the contract strictly forbids the farmer from making it public or sharing it with others. On the iTERAKA website, the French version of the contract, which is the only legal version, is password protected. The Malagasy version, however, can be publicly viewed (as of 29 October 2025).

There is a reason why companies do not want the contracts to be public. In all the contracts that GRAIN has been able to view, farmers, in a best case scenario, might get a couple of dollars a month and have to take on all kinds of costs and obligations — like going to regular project meetings, providing proof of land titles, filling out paperwork, maintaining the trees (including protecting them from fires and storms) and, most importantly, sacrificing portions of their farmland that could otherwise have been used to grow crops for food or income. And all this to provide a cover for far away corporations to continue belching out emissions and worsening a climate emergency that is badly affecting these very same farmers.

The Land Matrix report does acknowledge the fundamental problems with carbon offsetting and does highlight how standards and certification bodies are not doing anywhere near enough to address the failings. But it concludes with a set of recommendations for how to somehow make such projects better for communities.

Its core recommendation is to “rebalance” the share of large-scale land acquisition projects with “community or farmer-based projects”. We strongly disagree. Both types of projects are causing land grabs and other harms and injustices across the world. And both types are based on a false equation between the burning of fossil fuels, which releases a source of carbon buried deep under the earth’s surface for millions of years, and the sequestering of carbon in a thin layer at the top of the earth’s surface, highly susceptible to being released back into the atmosphere at any moment.

These fundamental problems cannot be resolved by better land governance, standards or transparency, which are the Land Matrix’s other three recommendations. For us, the takeaway is that we all have to build stronger analyses of what is going on with these carbon land grabs, and put an end to offsetting as a false solution to the climate crisis — urgently.

Article first published in Mongabay