Bringing Transparency to Carbon Credit Projects

A new dataset compiled by GRAIN and the University of Chicago Data Science Institute (DSI) shines a light on the ‘carbon credit’ market, the system of trading and regulating credits that allow a company or individual to emit a specific amount of greenhouse gasses. The dataset identifies 279 large-scale tree and crop-planting carbon credit projects that corporations have initiated across the world since 2016. GRAIN released the dataset with an accompanying report that highlights the social and environmental impacts of these ‘land deal’ projects. 

GRAIN is an international non-profit organization that works to support small farmers and social movements in their struggles for community-controlled and biodiversity-based food systems. As part of their research and advocacy efforts, GRAIN tracks information about land deals for carbon farming to encourage oversight and monitor their impacts to local communities’ sovereignty. 

GRAIN’s goal was to collect and expand the information in leading carbon credit databases and combine them with important details from identified articles of interest. This allowed for the creation of a dataset of carbon farming land acquisition deals across the globe. The DSI brought technical expertise in working with complex data sources, building automated pipelines, as well as visualizing and communicating that data to make this project possible. 

Carbon credits or carbon offsets are generated by projects designed to either reduce emissions or capture and store carbon. A credit is a transferable financial instrument that represents an emission reduction that has been verified by a government or independent certification body. In its most basic form, a company buys land, plants trees, and gets a certification company to provide them a number of carbon credits equivalent to the number of tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent their action reduced or removed from the environment. These carbon credits can then be sold to companies that are interested in advertising better net emissions.

Working with GRAIN’s staff, DSI software engineer Trevor Spreadbury parsed available information to build the dataset of carbon farming projects that met the following criteria: projects that involve the large-scale planting of crops and/or tree species on a combined area of land over 100 hectares for the purpose of producing carbon credits; are driven by companies from outside the communities; were initiated since 2016 and up to March 31, 2024 (roughly post-Paris Agreement); and are located in the global South. 

These projects involve over 9 million hectares of land in the global South– an area roughly the size of Portugal. The most affected region, in terms of land area, is Africa, with projects covering over 5.2 million hectares.

Using this dataset, GRAIN found that 52 countries in the global South have been targeted by carbon farming projects. Half the projects are in just four countries: China, India, Brazil and Colombia. However, projects in these countries account for less than a third of the total land area involved. The most affected region, in terms of land area, is Africa, with projects covering over 5.2 million hectares. For a breakdown of projects by country and region based on this dataset, see this spreadsheet. 

The collaboration was made possible in part by The 11th Hour Project, a program of The Schmidt Family Foundation. The DSI serves as a centralized hub for software and data science for 11th Hour Project grantees. DSI research staff work to lower the barriers to mission-driven data science through education, consultation, project-based applications and collaboration. Read more about the DSI and The 11th Hour Project here.