Kariba REDD+

Inside the project

Kariba REDD+ (Verra VCS 902) began on 1 July 2011 and spans the Rural District Councils of Binga, Nyaminyami, Hurungwe and Mbire in northern Zimbabwe, an area commonly cited at about 785,000 hectares of forest.

It was developed by Carbon Green Investments, a company run by Zimbabwean businessman Steve Wentzel and registered in Guernsey, with Swiss firm South Pole acting as carbon asset developer and marketer; the project was certified under Verra's VCS and Climate, Community & Biodiversity standards.

The project generated over US$100 million in credit revenue, and its credits were bought by major companies including Volkswagen, Gucci, Nestlé, McKinsey, Porsche, TotalEnergies, Delta Air Lines, L'Oréal and others to offset emissions.

From 2023 the project became heavily contested: investigations by Follow the Money (Jan 2023), and The New Yorker (Heidi Blake, 16 Oct 2023), alongside Die Zeit and SourceMaterial, alleged that the project vastly overstated avoided deforestation and that little revenue reached local communities.

As viewed in September 2026, Verra's registry lists VCS 902 as withdrawn, with 26,822,953 units issued, 21,956,707 retired and 3,750,678 cancelled.

Image credit

Sean Ice1, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia CommonsImage source ↗

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Objectives

• Reduce deforestation and forest degradation across the four districts through improved agriculture, beekeeping, fuelwood plantations, fire management and other livelihood activities (per the project's stated design).
• Channel a share of carbon revenue to local communities and conservation, a claim that investigative reports later disputed.
• Generate verified emission-reduction credits under Verra's VCS standard (the project's design document projected on the order of tens of millions of credits over its lifetime).

Approach

• REDD+ avoided-deforestation methodology under Verra VCS, with credits issued against a projected baseline of forest loss; the choice and updating of that baseline is central to the over-crediting dispute.
• Verra opened a review/placed the project on hold on 17 October 2023; following a roughly two-year review it reported that about 57% of the project's ~27 million issued credits were 'in excess' (Verra cited 15,220,520 excess credits). South Pole ended its agreements with Carbon Green Investments on 27 October 2023, and CGI later announced (May 2024) it would withdraw Kariba and the Chirisa project from Verra's registry.