Globalisation is not the first word that springs to mind when one drives through the remote tribal trust lands of KwaZulu-Natal, but hundreds of small-scale farmers who raise cattle on this rugged landscape — as their ancestors did for centuries before them — are now plugged into an international source of income.
A visit to the Amangwane and Amazizi communities reveals how local farmers are benefiting from a carbon programme called the Northern Drakensberg Grassland Restoration & Stewardship in South Africa (Grass).
The programme secures sustainable financing for long-term regenerative grazing and fire management by generating carbon credits that are sold on the Verra voluntary carbon market. Verra is a global nonprofit organisation that acts as an independent quality-control body and registry for carbon offsets.
In plain language: farming communities implement improved grazing, animal health and fire management measures aimed at restoring soil carbon and grass cover. (It is interesting to note that the optimal length for grazing grass is the height of a tall beer can.) The results of these interventions are assessed and measured by accredited auditors before Verra issues carbon credits. These are sold by a broker on the carbon exchange, and the farmers receive hard cash, with the bonus outcome of healthier cattle that fetch higher prices at auction.
Verra runs the Verified Carbon Standard, the world’s largest greenhouse gas crediting programme, which works on a similar value-shifting scale to the gold exchange.
Using this, companies committed to sustainable development goals purchase official verified carbon units (VCUs). One VCU equals 1t of carbon reduced or removed from the atmosphere.
Carbon credits do not erase corporate pollution, neither do they enable greenhouse gas emitters to claim they are carbon neutral. But they do help fund soil restoration and are of tangible benefit to those on the ground.
Verra’s forest credits were previously involved in scandals, which has fuelled scepticism and accusations of greenwashing across the voluntary carbon market. But the framework for sustainable grazing is very different.
In the deforestation scenario, dubious credits were awarded for preventing a hypothetical future environmental threat (for example, not cutting down trees). In the agricultural arena credits are awarded for actively removing CO₂ equivalents. Carbon market registries and agricultural scientists concur that the current rules governing these credits are highly robust.
A R134m payday
Verra’s VM0042 agricultural standard relies on a strict measure-and-model approach, combining actual physical soil core samples with rigorous biogeochemical modelling. This methodology has been officially approved as meeting the core carbon principles of nonprofit governance body the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market.
When properly audited, the agricultural credits channel millions in nature-based climate finance directly to communal herders and farmers. The Grass initiative uses the funds to restore severely degraded rangelands while supporting local livelihoods.
Verra does not buy or trade; its role is purely to validate, register and track credits. It effectively operates through brokers. The middleman in this case is The African Stove Company (TASC), one of the world’s leading carbon project developers, which pioneered the Grass project.
TASC’s mandate is to identify, finance and develop commercially viable carbon projects that meet the global demand for carbon credits and deliver meaningful, positive impact for the communities where it works. This year TASC enabled the issuing of 249,094 verified carbon credits, with 95,364ha of communal grasslands under improved management. This translates into R53m worth of carbon credits, which goes to farmers.
The entire communal component of the Grass project now covers 604,780ha of rangeland and is projected to reach 1-million hectares, with annual sequestration or avoided emissions of more than 380,000t of CO₂ equivalents.
Literally at grass-roots level in this cycle is Meat Naturally Africa (MNA), a company founded in 2016 that provides training in regenerative grazing techniques, rangeland restoration, community-based fire management, livestock production and health, record-keeping and market readiness. It also holds mobile auctions to provide communal farmers with the opportunity to reach new markets.
To date, MNA has generated more than R134m for 10,000 farmers, mostly from auctions. Income from carbon credits is the newest arrow in its quiver.
MNA founder and CEO Sarah Frazee says: “Our mission focuses on sustainable livestock production, rangeland regeneration and wildlife protection, ensuring that profits are reinvested in farmer collectives. We create agreements that give pastoralists access to better livestock, meat, wool and carbon markets in exchange for good grazing management. This approach has restored degraded ecosystems in South Africa and we are poised to scale it across Southern Africa.
“We have funding secured to grow to 1-million hectares in South Africa and are looking for support to reach 5-million hectares across the continent by 2030. Our vision is to scale our approach across Africa’s nearly 700-million hectares of communal rangelands, where the same challenges of degraded land, weak market access and poverty persist. Few other initiatives combine operational logistics, verified restoration and premium market creation at this scale.”
Accounting for emissions
Why do companies buy carbon credits? MNA technical director Ruan de Wet explains things from the perspective of a “polluter” wanting to offset its own unavoidable emissions.
“As a business, let’s say you are emitting a certain amount right now. You need to be reducing those emissions, and for that you have to set targets. First you deal with abatement — you stop burning fossil fuels — then you carry out beyond-value-chain mitigation, which is where carbon credits come in.
“Say you’re a construction company that needs to produce cement. Until there is a cement-making process that doesn’t emit CO₂, you have to offset those last residual emissions. Paying for MNA and TASC to implement rangeland restoration is a way of accounting and taking responsibility for the emissions that are still happening on your journey towards net zero.”
According to TASC commercial director Storm Patel, who was previously head of global climate change and policy at Sasol and chair of the industry task team on climate change at the Energy Intensive User Group, it is slightly ridiculous that all this is voluntary.
“Unless there is a law that you need to reduce emissions, which in most jurisdictions is not the case, we’re expecting companies to do this out of the goodness of their hearts and through stakeholder and investor pressure. The sceptic’s view of what we’re doing with MNA was traditionally that we were allowing people to pay for carbon offsets to get out of having to do anything about it themselves. But the irony is that the companies buying carbon credits are very often the companies that are also doing a lot themselves. They are voluntarily trying to take responsibility. The paradigm has been turned on its head.”
Another paradigm shift involves the pioneering distribution of earnings. Frazee explains this: “TASC and MNA have a revenue-sharing arrangement based on an increasing full transition of ownership of the carbon credits. Many carbon project developers would agree to a 50% split for the duration of the project, which is 100 years. TASC has agreed to take what it has put in, plus a return on investment, and then hand the rest over, so all the revenue will eventually go entirely to the farmers.”
MNA partners with 180 communities and associations who are driving restoration across 580,000ha of communal rangelands in South Africa. According to the agreement with TASC, when there is a carbon-credit issuance, that money is transferred to MNA. How it gets to individuals is a collective process.
“We have a model that calculates what each collective farmers association earned from that monitoring period and we assist with the fiscal management function,” says Frazee. “When the revenue comes in, we share the numbers at a community meeting and help that association develop a 12-month budget for how it allocates the money, both to sustain the rangeland restoration and to invest in [members’] wellbeing. This budget discussion is taken back to the whole community and we meet again if there are questions, until it is endorsed by everyone. We never say what needs to happen, we simply facilitate the process.”
