Reporting for this story was supported by a Pulitzer Center Rainforest Reporting Grant.

BENSON NGUSILO, 56, vividly remembers the painful events of May 16, 2024 like it was yesterday. It was the middle of the rainy season in Sasimwani, in the southwestern part of Kenya, and he had sent his son, Alex Meikobi, 19 to the forest where his cattle were grazing to collect milk for his family.

To reach the forest, Meikobi had to cross Olokirkirai river, which was raging due to the heavy rains. A bridge across the river consisted of three poles laid across it. Meikobi managed to cross to the other side and filled two jerry cans with milk from his father’s cows. But when Meikobi didn’t make it back home as expected that evening, Ngusilo went out looking for him. He crossed the river and found one milk can on the other side near the riverbank, but no sign of Meikobi. He enlisted friends and relatives to help with a search, which lasted into the night. The next day, the search party recovered his son’s body in the river not far from the makeshift bridge. He had fallen and drowned in the river.

Meikobi was crossing the river because his family had been evicted — with the rest of their Indigenous Ogiek community — from their home in Kenya’s Maasai Mau Forest six months earlier, in November of 2023. During the evictions, which at the time the government said were executed to protect the environment, police burned and otherwise destroyed dozens of structures, including Ngusilo’s. A year and a half later, in May this year, Kenyan President William Ruto put the land, measuring 250,000 hectares, in a trust and issued the title deed to the Narok County government.

Following the evictions, Ngusilo had rented a house in Olokirkirai, a small town 40 minutes north of Narok in Kenya, across the river from the forest. His cattle, sheep and goats remained in the Maasai Mau Forest, which is part of the larger Mau Forest Complex in Kenya’s Rift Valley.

The evictions disregarded the Ogeik’s ancestral and legal rights to the land, Ngusilo says. The Ogeik have been living in the forest for thousands of years, including in the village of Sasimwani, where Nguislo and other elders lived. Families were officially allocated the land in 1979 by a previous government, but were never awarded the title deeds. They were still awaiting the issuance of title deeds when they were forced to move, a decision they believe stems from plans to implement a carbon trading project there.

Ngusilo grieved the death of his son. But he was thankful to have found his body in the raging river. He turned next to the daunting task of where to bury him. Having, until recently, lived all of his life in the forest, he had never been faced with the question of where to bury kin — traditionally, all community members were buried in designated places in their family lands with the community in attendance. The community does not have a public cemetery neither do they bury their kin far from their homesteads.

Olokirkirai, a town of a few thousand people, has no public cemetery. The nearest cemetery is in Narok town, and the family didn’t view it as a viable option given the Ogiek’s traditions. They decided to fundraise to buy a small piece of land in Olokirkirai. “We had to pool together as a family to fundraise the 700,000 Shillings ($5,400) to buy this small piece of land so that we could bury him,” said Ngusilo, his voice low and calm, his face hiding any emotion.

Ngusilo links his son’s death directly the evictions. “This could not have happened if we had not been evicted from our land because my son would not have left the house to cross the river after it had rained that much,” he said.

The evictions have led to tremendous suffering for others in the community too. Grace Memusi, Ngusilo’s aunt, recalls almost a hundred police and forest guards landed in her homestead at around 8 a.m. on that November morning. She says they started by breaking down her fence, then proceeded to her food store, her kitchen, and her stone-walled, tin-roofed house. “I had a lot in my homestead,” she said. “[My] children’s rooms, maize store, they brought them all down. They used axes, digging bars, and even metal mallets because the house was plastered and had iron mesh inside. There were many of them and [they] went to all the rooms destroying and stealing from us.” The most important thing she lost that day was the title deed to a plot in a nearby shopping center.

The impacts are lasting. As Joseph Luari, 62, explains, the Ogiek in Sasimwani have never known any other home. “We grew up here and were even shown graves of our forefathers in our land,” he said. “Even the history of our people told to us by our grandfathers is that our people lived here. They never came from somewhere else.”

The Ogiek are, unfortunately, not alone in this regard: As the number of carbon credit projects surge in Kenya, their impacts on Indigenous communities there are surging as well.

CARBON CREDITS ARE, more or less, what they sound like. Projects receive credits for each ton of carbon they store or avoid, and those credits can be sold to “offset” carbon-intensive activities, like fossil fuel extraction or automobile production. The carbon credit market in Africa has grown in recent years alongside demand, and Kenya accounts for about 25 percent of the African market, making it a leader in the sector. The country’s carbon credits are mainly concentrated in nature-based carbon-removal projects which utilize natural ecosystems to absorb and store carbon from the atmosphere. These include forest-based projects, as well as grasslands projects.

In 2022, private and public carbon sequestration projects in Kenya were issued some 11 million voluntary carbon credits. The majority of carbon credits sequestered in Kenya are sold to multinationals including tech companies like Meta. In 2023, as part of this the country’s effort to grow its carbon markets, Kenya signed a carbon credit deal with Blue Carbon, an Emirati company established in 2022. At the time, Blue Carbon was entering into agreements with six African countries to “acquire huge swathes of their forests to harvest carbon credits.”

In Kenya, the details regarding the deal were never made public, despite requests by private citizens and journalists. However, many Ogiek see a clear connection between their 2023 evictions — and the subsequent conversion of their land to trust land under custody of the government — and this agreement. They believe the government plans to sell carbon credits from the Mau Forest, and evicted them to do so.

Ngusilo’s eldest son, Steve Ngusilo, 41, says that then-Narok County Commissioner Isaac Masinde told him as much during a 2023 trip to Narok, the county capital, which they made to ask Masinde to stop the evictions. County commissioners are government administrators representing the national government in the counties. They serve to coordinate national government departments, oversee implementation of policies and facilitate collaboration between the national and county government, and Masinde was in charge of the evictions. (Efforts to obtain comment from lands and environment officials in Narok County were unsuccessful.)

“If it was not for carbon credits, they wouldn’t have evicted us,” Steve Ngusilo says. “They want to finish this community so that others elsewhere can live well. Because, as I understand, carbon credits are for cutting emissions elsewhere, but why is the one conserving the environment being hurt?”

Noting the issuance of title deed to the Narok County government, Kobei agrees that it was all a calculated move. “It means there might be something the government wants to attract by having the title of the whole Maasai Mau, as they allege, to be under the county government,” he said. “To me it may be negotiating for related carbon or related interest in the Mau Forest.”

Human rights groups have made similar connections. In a joint statement issued in 2023, Amnesty International, Minority Rights Group International, and Survival wrote: “We further note the recent announcement of a government initiative to trade carbon credits on millions of hectares in Kenya. We call on the government to clarify whether the Ogiek evictions are linked to this initiative.”

THE 2023 EVICTIONS are part of a long history of displacement of the Ogiek, which stretches back to the British colonial government that forcibly removed them from their land in the early twentieth century. The Kenyan government continued a string of evictions stretching back, as Luari recalls, to the 1980s.

Following the most recent 2023 evictions, Steve Ngusilo said that Kenya Forest Service guards have been stationed at Sasimwani. This was to ensure that the Ogiek do not go back into the forest. These guards, he says, continue to harass the Ogiek in the forest, beat them, and solicit bribes from them. They demand money from the Ogiek for grazing their livestock in the forest, he says, and community members comply as they have nowhere else to graze.

The Ogiek have been pushing back against evictions for more than a decade. In 2012, the community brought a case before to the African Court of Human and Peoples Rights in Arusha, Tanzania, asking the court to compel the government to stop evictions, recognize the Ogiek’s ownership of the land and pay them compensation for losses suffered during the evictions in Sasimwani and in other parts of the Mau Forest where Ogieks had been evicted.

In 2017, the court issued a ruling in this case, recognizing the Ogiek as an Indigenous people with rights to their ancestral lands, and mandating reforms to prevent violation of these rights. In 2022, in light of ongoing violations, the court reaffirmed this judgement, ordering reparations by the Kenyan government, including financial compensation, title to their land, and full recognition of their rights as an Indigenous group.

Steve Ngusilo says the 2023 evictions were conducted in utter disregard of the Arusha court’s rulings. This June, the court held a public hearing to assess Kenya’s compliance with its orders. At the hearing, the Kenyan government denied evicting the Ogiek from their ancestral land in Sasimwani and further told the court that there are plans to compensate the community for prior evictions, as per the courts orders.

“I was surprised by the way the government, through the Solicitor General’s office, alleged that they are doing something towards implementation. But as we are talking there is no implementation,” said Daniel Kobei, the executive director of the Ogiek People’s Development Programme, who attended the hearings.

THE OGIEK, UNFORTUNATELY, are not alone in their experience when it comes to carbon markets. Broadly speaking, carbon credit schemes have long been criticized for allowing companies to continue to pollute, for difficulties around verifying the integrity of the projects, and for displacing Indigenous communities. Additionally, though research shows that Indigenous peoples are valuable stewards of biodiverse landscapes — the kinds of landscapes that can store large quantities of carbon — a Lancet article on carbon markets as a form of colonialism against Indigenous people notes that “their exclusion within carbon market decision-making is ongoing.”

In Kenya, other Indigenous communities, including the Maasai and Borana, have reported eviction or exclusion from their lands due to carbon trading schemes. Communities elsewhere too, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Brazil, Peru, and Indonesia, have reported similar experiences.

There are protections in place that are meant to prevent this, including Article 6.4 Sustainability Tool of the Paris Agreement, which was adopted shortly before last year’s international climate negotiations, COP29, in Baku, Azerbaijan. The tool seeks to uphold the principle of “do no harm” and foster sustainable development. Among other safeguards, it spells out the criteria by which a carbon credit project participant should engage with the Indigenous people. “Article 6.4 activities do not result in the forcible removal of Indigenous Peoples from their lands and territories. No relocation is to take place without the FPIC (free, prior and informed consent) of the Indigenous Peoples concerned. FPIC must be documented, as well as the agreements reached in the good faith dialogues, consultations, and negotiations with the Indigenous Peoples,” the tool states.

COP29 ultimately advanced carbon credit schemes by making country-to-country trading and a carbon crediting mechanism fully operational with the UNFCCC framework. Following this significant step, Rim Berahab, an economist at the Policy Center for the New South wrote that “the road ahead involves navigating competing interests, and ensuring that carbon markets serve their purpose without compromising environmental or social goals.”

Last year, the Kenyan government enacted carbon market regulations that aim to bring more structure to the country’s trading scheme, and to protect Indigenous communities through similar requirements for free, prior, and informed consent. A request for comment on progress on its implementation from Dr. Festus Ngeno, Kenay’s principal secretary for environment, was unsuccessful.

But as COP30, which will be held in Brazil this November, approaches, the Indigenous Ogiek remain dispossessed of their land. As Kobei says, “We bear the brunt of carbon credit programs because we are the ones living in forests and in rangelands that are untouched and therefore, we automatically become the victims of what is happening.”