Amicus Brief on Carbon Markets to the African Court of Human and Peoples’ Rights

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Experts and researchers from The Promise Institute, along with colleagues from Climate Counsel, Sudan Human Rights Hub, and SOMO, have submitted an amicus brief to the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the human rights impacts of carbon markets in the context of climate change. 

Carbon offset projects in Africa are often presented as a climate solution: turning forests, soil, and land into carbon credits that can be sold to offset emissions elsewhere. In reality, many of them are deeply flawed, and our submission raises urgent concerns. 

🚩 Carbon credits are misleading: they are not actually fighting climate change. 

Multiple studies have found that the vast majority of carbon credits are not real: they do not actually deliver the emissions reductions they promise. Instead, carbon offsetting is allowing polluters to continue polluting, while claiming to be “carbon neutral” - delaying the real emissions cuts we need, while allowing climate change, and its impacts on human rights, to continue.   

🚩 Carbon offset projects keep causing forced evictions and land grabs. 

Carbon offset projects have repeatedly led to the forced displacement of local communities, including of Indigenous peoples from their ancestral lands without free, prior and informed consent – separating people from homes, sacred sites, and traditional ways of living. By uprooting peoples lives and livelihoods, to make space to plant trees, the industry is placing profits before human rights, and threatening the survival of Indigenous peoples and cultures. 

🚩The “green colonialism” of carbon markets is reinforcing patterns of foreign control over Africa’s lands and resources.  

Projects driven by multinational companies have been extracting profits from the continent at the expense of local communities, and foreign actors are gaining exclusive rights over massive swaths of land – sometimes 10% or even 20% of a country’s entire landmass!  

Article 21 of the Charter requires States to protect peoples against foreign exploitation of their natural resources, and we argue that this obligation applies to the carbon market industry just as it does to other extractive sectors. 

The African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights is preparing to issue a landmark advisory opinion on climate change, following those issued by the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (2024), the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (2025) and the International Court of Justice (2025).  

As carbon markets expand across Africa without adequate safeguards, the Court has an important opportunity to clarify States’ obligations. States must take action to address climate change, and they must ensure that these measures do not put human rights at risk.