Kenya’s National Carbon Registry Goes Live: A Digital Backbone for Africa’s Most Advanced Carbon Market

Kenya has taken one of the most consequential steps in the history of its climate agenda, officially launching the Kenya National Carbon Registry (KNCR) — a sovereign digital platform that will serve as the authoritative system for registering, tracking, authorising, and reporting all carbon market activities within the country. The launch, held in Nairobi on February 17–18, 2026, was presided over by Cabinet Secretary for Environment, Climate Change and Forestry Dr Deborah Barasa, alongside an assembly of senior government officials, international development partners, and representatives from Kenya’s growing carbon market ecosystem.

The event marks the formal transition from system development to full national operationalisation of Kenya’s carbon infrastructure — a process that involved rigorous stakeholder consultation, user acceptance testing, and institutional validation before the registry went live. For a country that has been at the centre of Africa’s carbon market story for over a decade, the KNCR represents a decisive upgrade: from a fragmented, opaque, and controversy-prone set of arrangements to a state-backed, digitally governed, and internationally aligned framework capable of attracting serious global investment.

“The registry gives Kenya’s green economy a digital heartbeat,” CS Barasa declared at the launch, describing the platform as foundational to a new era of climate commerce. “The National Carbon Registry is the title deed of Kenya’s emissions reduction. It is our assurance to the world that Kenya is open for high-integrity, high-value climate investment.”

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What the KNCR Does — and Why It Matters

At its core, the KNCR is a centralised, secure, and nationally sovereign digital ledger. It records the creation, issuance, transfer, and retirement of carbon credits — and, critically, it prevents the double-counting of emission reductions, the single biggest credibility problem that has plagued voluntary carbon markets globally. The platform also manages Internationally Transferred Mitigation Outcomes (ITMOs) — the units traded under bilateral and multilateral agreements as part of the carbon market mechanisms established under Article 6.2 of the Paris Agreement.

The technical implementation of the KNCR was led by Verst Carbon, working alongside national institutions to build a system aligned with international standards while reflecting Kenya’s sovereign context. Ian Mutai, Chief Technology Officer at Verst Carbon, described the registry as representing “a fundamental shift in Kenya’s carbon market infrastructure” — one that embeds transparency and accountability by design rather than as an afterthought.

Prior to this launch, Kenya’s carbon market operated without a single unified tracking system. A single ton of carbon could, in theory, be claimed twice. Project revenues could leak through opaque arrangements without reaching the local communities that managed the underlying ecosystems. As CS Barasa herself acknowledged, “Communities at the frontline of conservation often received little benefit, while the value of our carbon credits, locally called ‘Hewa Kaa’, leaked through opaque arrangements. Without a trusted system, we were wealthy in assets but poor in proof.”

The KNCR resolves this by creating an unbroken chain of custody: from the moment a carbon project is identified and validated, through third-party verification by international bodies like Verra and Gold Standard, to credit issuance, trading, and final retirement. Every step is now logged on a national, state-backed platform.

The Regulatory Architecture Behind the Registry

The KNCR does not exist in isolation. It is the operational culmination of a multi-year legislative and regulatory effort that has progressively built Kenya’s carbon market framework from the ground up.

The journey began with the Climate Change Act 2016, which first acknowledged carbon markets as a tool of climate governance and designated the National Environment Management Authority (NEMA) as the sector’s primary regulator. This was followed by the Climate Change (Amendment) Act 2023, which significantly strengthened provisions governing participation in carbon markets. The Climate Change (Carbon Markets) Regulations 2024, gazetted on May 17, 2024, then set the detailed rules for how carbon projects would be reviewed, approved, and governed, introducing the role of the Designated National Authority (DNA) within NEMA to provide oversight of all carbon market activities.

Most recently, the Climate Change (Carbon Trading) Regulations 2025 and the Climate Change (Non-Market Approaches) Regulations 2025 further refined the ecosystem — with the latter ensuring that Kenya’s carbon trading activities remain aligned with its broader national climate strategies and with Article 6.8 of the Paris Agreement, which governs collaborative climate actions outside traditional credit exchanges.

Under the regulations, all carbon credit-generating projects — whether under bilateral or multilateral frameworks — must formally register on the KNCR, giving the government full oversight of its carbon market landscape and opening formal participation to small-scale stakeholders in agriculture, energy, forestry, transport, and waste sectors.

Article 6, Bilateral Deals, and Kenya’s Global Positioning

A central purpose of the KNCR is to position Kenya as a credible and technically compliant partner under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement — the framework that governs how countries can cooperate through carbon market mechanisms to collectively meet their climate targets. Article 6 allows for the international trading of verified emission reductions through ITMOs, but doing so requires a national infrastructure capable of authorising transfers and applying corresponding adjustments to prevent double-counting at the national accounting level.

Kenya already has a bilateral carbon credit agreement in place with Switzerland, and is in ongoing negotiations with Sweden, Singapore, and South Korea. The KNCR will now provide the technical backbone that makes such agreements fully operational — and it will make Kenya a far more attractive negotiating partner for future bilateral deals.

Beyond bilateral agreements, Kenya is positioning itself at the global level. Special Climate Envoy Ali Mohamed led Kenya’s participation in the Coalition to Grow Carbon Markets — co-launched with the United Kingdom and Singapore at the 2025 London Climate Action Week. The Coalition aims to restore confidence in voluntary carbon markets, clarify the role of carbon credits in corporate decarbonisation strategies, and ultimately unlock $250 billion in climate finance by 2050 — a target that would help bridge the estimated $1.3 trillion annual climate finance gap facing developing nations.

Germany has been a key technical and financial partner in the KNCR’s development. The German Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), through GIZ Kenya, co-financed and supported the system alongside the European Union’s Data Governance in Africa Initiative. Germany has separately committed an additional 2.4 million euros to strengthen Kenya’s overall readiness for carbon markets.

At the launch, EU Ambassador to Kenya Henriette Geiger offered perhaps the most commercially pointed assessment of the KNCR’s potential: “Kenya should develop carbon credits as a premium export product. This is the 21st century; we cannot rely only on tea, coffee, and avocado for export income.” She described a functioning national carbon registry as “the backbone of that integrity,” enabling transparent issuance, tracking, and transfer of credits while preventing double-counting and strengthening compliance with the Paris Agreement.

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The REDD+ Registry Connection

The KNCR does not stand alone in Kenya’s national carbon infrastructure. It was preceded by the Kenya REDD+ Registry, launched on July 28, 2025, which Kenya became the first African country to establish — a dedicated digital platform specifically for tracking verified forest-based emissions reductions and the carbon credits generated from them.

Built using the Environmental Registry platform from S&P Global Commodity Insights, the REDD+ Registry connects to S&P’s Meta Registry — a cross-registry data-sharing system that enhances global transparency, traceability, and verification in carbon markets. The launch was undertaken in partnership with the United Kingdom under the UK PACT (Partnering for Accelerated Climate Transitions) initiative.

Principal Secretary for the State Department of Forestry Gitonga Mugambi confirmed at the KNCR launch that the two registries are designed to be interoperable. “Together, they form a coherent national carbon market infrastructure, enhancing credibility and confidence for communities, private developers, and county governments,” Mugambi said. The REDD+ system tracks forest-specific credits, while the KNCR captures the full spectrum of Kenya’s carbon economy — from soils and rangelands to renewable energy and clean cookstoves — in a single unified system.

Kenya’s Carbon Market: Scale, Leadership, and Opportunity

Kenya’s decision to build this infrastructure is not surprising given the country’s already dominant position in Africa’s carbon market. According to the Kenya Private Sector Alliance, Kenya has issued more carbon credits than any other African country, accounting for approximately 20 to 25 percent of the continent’s total voluntary carbon credit supply. In 2022 alone, private and public carbon sequestration projects in Kenya were issued some 11 million voluntary carbon credits.

Kenya’s most celebrated project is the Kasigau Corridor REDD+ project, which has protected 200,000 acres of dryland forest, sequestered over 1.4 million tons of CO₂ annually, and issued more than 15 million verified credits since 2011, while directly supporting 120,000 local residents through healthcare and education programmes. The Lake Turkana Wind Power project — Africa’s largest wind farm — avoids 260,000 metric tons of CO₂ annually and generates over 600,000 carbon credits per year, verified by Verra. Kenya’s Olkaria geothermal plants avoid over 2 million tons of CO₂ annually, further underpinning the country’s credit generation capacity.

The global context also favours Kenya’s move. In 2025, the global carbon credit market was estimated at approximately $886.8 billion, with Africa contributing around 14 percent of global voluntary supply through approximately 300 million credits issued and about $1.2 billion in retired credits. The Africa Carbon Markets Initiative (ACMI), launched under African Union and UN Economic Commission for Africa frameworks, is committed to generating 300 million carbon credits annually by 2030, potentially worth $6 billion — with McKinsey analysis suggesting Kenya is positioned to capture approximately 20 percent of this expanded market.

International demand dynamics are also shifting in Kenya’s favour. The Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA) has opened up to 161 million units in demand between 2024 and 2026. The European Union, meanwhile, is proposing to reintroduce limited purchases of high-quality international carbon credits into its climate strategy from 2036, potentially creating cumulative demand of roughly 1 billion carbon credits between 2036 and 2049 — a market valued at around $20 billion at a conservative $20 per tonne.

Community Benefit Sharing: Putting Revenue Where It Belongs

One of the most consequential provisions embedded in the new carbon market regulations is the mandatory community benefit-sharing requirement. Under the Climate Change (Carbon Trading) Regulations, 25 percent of all carbon credit proceeds must be channelled into local community projects — directly addressing the long-standing criticism that carbon revenues have historically bypassed the communities on whose lands the underlying conservation activity takes place.

This requirement reflects hard lessons from Kenya’s own carbon market history. A 2025 court ruling in Isiolo County saw indigenous communities successfully challenge a massive soil carbon project covering 10 percent of their land — citing lack of consent, missing environmental assessments, and inadequate consultation. The project, which claimed to remove 50 million tonnes of carbon, was suspended from issuing credits. Separately, concerns have been raised about the treatment of the Ogiek people in the Mau Forest region in connection with carbon credit arrangements. These cases have made community rights and benefit sharing central to Kenya’s new regulatory design.

In addition to the community levy, certified entities operating in the carbon market receive a preferential corporate tax rate of 15 percent for the first ten years — an incentive designed to attract project developers and sustain investment in Kenya’s carbon economy over the long term.

Challenges, Credibility Gaps, and the Road Ahead

The KNCR’s launch comes at a moment of heightened global scrutiny of voluntary carbon markets. Investigations in 2023 found that several high-profile forest conservation projects — including some in Kenya — had significantly overestimated their emission reductions, in some cases by more than 50 percent, based on satellite data and counterfactual analysis. The Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market has tightened quality thresholds, ruling out most cookstove carbon credits from its quality scheme after rejecting two widely used methodologies for insufficient rigour. A 2023 assessment by the Stockholm Environment Institute found that only 38 percent of Kenya’s carbon projects had successfully navigated validation processes, with many stalling due to complex methodological requirements and high transaction costs.

The KNCR is the most credible structural response Kenya has offered to these concerns. By making all project registration, verification, and credit issuance visible on a sovereign digital platform — with state authority behind each credit — the government is betting that institutional credibility can restore market confidence. PS Festus Ng’eno framed the registry in terms of sovereign accountability: “Kenya’s carbon credits are sovereign assets, protected by law, and must deliver real value to our people, our environment, and our economy.”

Africa currently captures only around 2 percent of its estimated annual carbon credit potential of 2,400 million credits — a gap that reflects not a lack of natural assets, but a lack of credible, well-governed infrastructure. Former African Development Bank President Akinwumi Adesina warned that foreign buyers have sometimes paid as little as $3 per tonne for African carbon credits, while permits in regulated markets like the EU Emissions Trading System trade at far higher prices. Closing that pricing gap — and capturing more value within Africa — requires exactly the kind of high-integrity governance infrastructure the KNCR represents.

Kenya’s green transition, as CS Barasa put it, “is no longer a vision. It is now a verifiable reality.” Whether the rest of the world — investors, buyers, and bilateral partners — accepts that invitation will determine how much of carbon market’s vast financial potential Kenya ultimately converts into development outcomes for its people.

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By: Montel Kamau

Serrari Financial Analyst

23rd February, 2026