<p>Scaling up the Voluntary Carbon Market in Africa: Potential, Rationale, Processes, and Challenges.</p>

This paper critically examines the potential, rationale, processes, and legal challenges of scaling up the Voluntary Carbon Market ("VCM") in Africa, situated within the African Carbon Markets Initiative ("ACMI"), a COP27-era coalition seeking to build a "thriving [VCM] ecosystem in Africa by 2030". The ACMI aims to increase African carbon credit retirements nearly nineteen-fold by 2030, create tens of millions of jobs, mobilise billions in climate finance, and ensure equitable revenue distribution to local communities. It situates itself between two competing narratives—scepticism over offsetting's climate integrity and its impacts on Indigenous Peoples and local communities, and optimism about the VCM's development potential for Africa.

On the supply side, the paper analyses Verra's rules on permanence and land tenure through the "Blood Carbon" controversy involving the Northern Rangelands Trust in Kenya, showing how difficult it can be to prove project ownership even within a relatively developed property rights system. On the demand side, it undertakes a doctrinal comparison of the pending greenwashing cases Berrin v. Delta Air Lines Inc. and the Dutch KLM litigation. Despite differing in framing—Delta's carbon-neutrality claim versus KLM's more nuanced sustainability marketing—both cases place the additionality and permanence of the underlying credits, and the integrity of the VCM's dominant methodologies, at issue, effectively "putting the VCM on trial".

The paper contends that the litigation's outcome carries material consequences for Africa, since demand for African credits originates almost entirely outside the continent, and much of Africa's nature-based supply is avoidance-based and thus exposed to these credibility challenges. It concludes that while African participation in the VCM holds clear development and NDC-related potential, unresolved tensions over land tenure, permanence, and the "science" of offsetting—now being tested in Delta and KLM—threaten to constrain the demand-side finance on which that participation depends.