By Witness Radio team

Uganda’s reforestation projects are promoted as solutions to mitigate the climate crisis. But as they are implemented, there’s a deepening of inequality, destruction of lives, and a shift of environmental burdens onto the World’s poorest.

When 63-year-old Nalugo Rosemary talks about the day her life fell apart, a thousand untold tales are carried in her voice.

“In 2004,” she recalls, “Kajura and Peter, who were working for the Kikonda plantation, came with the police and arrested me. They said I was encroaching on company land. I was cultivating my own land. They beat me, threw me in detention with my two young children… for three days.”

Nalugo is one of the over thousands of people whose livelihoods were destroyed to pave the way for Kikonda’s reforestation project, raising questions about the legality and ethics of land acquisitions involved in these initiatives. Her land, her crops, her home, her livelihoods all vanished in a project that, on paper, was supposed to help save the planet and support livelihoods.

These Carbon projects are internationally celebrated for environmental protection. Still, the establishment of monoculture plantations of eucalyptus and pine trees, such as those on the Kikonda land, raises concerns about biodiversity loss and ecological imbalance, which are not addressed in the current description.

Global Woods manages the area under a 49-year lease, but systemic transparency and human rights issues remain, raising concerns about accountability in carbon projects.

More than 30 villages had already established a prosperous agricultural and cattle-keeping community before the eviction; some had been there since the 1980s, while local authorities had moved others in the 1990s. Nalugo was one of them.

“Some of us were called by leaders by then and told to farm. The leaders claimed we should not die poor, yet there was free, available land, meaning we should use the forest reserve land. The leaders said they wanted us to be better in the future.”

But in 2002–2003, the “future” arrived in the form of bulldozers, armed soldiers, and company workers harvesting residents’ crops on tractors as their owners watched helplessly.

The plantation insists it was not involved in forced evictions. Despite evictions happening over 23 years back, people living on the boundary of the plantation, like Kabangira George, who chairs a committee of the affected group, say the trauma never ended.

“People are beaten and not allowed to access the forest. They don’t allow us to access the water dams. Our cows and goats are seized, and they demand money ranging from 20,000 to 50,000 shillings to release our animals.” He added while speaking to the Witness Radio team.

A few kilometers away, the story repeats itself almost word-for-word. In Mubende, the New Forests Company (NFC), a British enterprise, displaced 901 families to establish the Namwasa Forest Reserve reforestation project.

“My community was affected by the New Forest Company project. It affected 901 families, totaling over 10,000 people across seven villages in Mubende district. Crops were razed, homes burnt, animals killed. Children died while fleeing armed soldiers during the brutal evictions to give way for the plantation, Mr. Ndagize revealed.

Unfortunately, the Witness Radio team was unable to speak directly with company representatives to ask for their perspective. On its website, NFC claims extensive social benefits: schools, water points, and jobs. But to residents like Julius Ndagize, these claims feel like a cruel joke.

“They call this development,” he says bitterly. “But it brought only suffering. Poverty and backwardness. The schools they claim to have built are so expensive that poor people like us can’t afford to educate our children in them.”

His neighbor Jane (not her real name) adds that the community is not prioritized even for job opportunities and is not allowed to access their former lands.

“We request jobs from the company, but they don’t hire us. They hire people from far away,” she says. “We are not allowed to access forest lands, or even use some roads within. They are dangerous. When you are found there, you risk being attacked by company workers.”

Hoping to find a better example, our team traveled to western Uganda to investigate ECOTRUST’s Trees for Global Benefit (TGB) — a project praised globally for community-centred carbon offsetting.

ECOTRUST is a not-for-profit conservation organization established in Uganda in 1999 to conserve biological diversity and enhance social welfare by promoting innovative and sustainable environmental management. In that capacity, it receives and manages both private and public funding. In 2003, the organisation launched its leading Trees for Global Benefit (TGB) program – a carbon-offsetting scheme – that has been implemented in the Hoima and Kikuube Districts since 2013.

The programme encourages small-scale farmers to plant native regional trees on part of their land, rather than growing food as they did before, characterising it as a long-term investment.

Here, small-scale farmers were encouraged to convert farmland into tree plantations. Before its setup and implementation, people were told they would benefit from the carbon trading project and that it would bring financial stability. Mr. Rukundo Hannington Herbert of Butimba East Village, Budoma parish, was a budding farmer and businessman who claimed he was coerced into the project. He remembers being told he would “become rich.”

“I cut my bananas that fed my family and planted trees,” he says.

“After 18 years, I have been paid only 440,000, then 280,000, then 150,000. Is this the big money they promised?”

Many farmers who had joined the project are now withdrawing, saying it has pushed them back into poverty and even into extreme hunger. They have begun cutting down the trees and returning to fast-growing crops. “I have cut down these trees because they were not yielding as we were promised initially. I was dying of poverty.” He told the Witness Radio team.

Community educator Jorum Basiima says farmers were never informed about carbon buyers, pricing, or calculations.

“We don’t even know who buys carbon. We see people come and measure trees.” He reveals in an interview with Witness Radio that the project lacked transparency and only coerced people into planting, telling them they would earn a lot.

In an extensive report titled “Finance for Integrated Landscape Management: De-risking Smallholder Farmer Investments in Integrated Landscape Management,” ECOTRUST explains its specifically developed financial mechanism and outlines 12 key principles for the successful implementation of the project. Principle 8 states: “The earnings from carbon, along with the long-term carbon agreements, provide incentives and collateral for the participating households to develop multiple income streams.”

But Mr. Basiima insists, “We are only given money to do management, to manage the trees at the earlier stage. But for us, we don’t sell carbon. And we don’t even know, we don’t know any other thing, or even what carbon itself is.”

For a project meant to empower communities and restore landscapes, this absence of transparency reveals a troubling gap between promise and reality.

International Carbon expert Jonathan Crook, who works with Carbon Market Watch, a Belgium-based Non-Government Organisation, explains that Carbon credits often don’t deliver what they promise.

“A carbon credit is meant to represent one tonne of CO2 that has been avoided or reduced, or even removed from the atmosphere. But in many cases, a carbon credit cannot reliably guarantee this outcome. Many peer-reviewed scientific articles, as well as findings from NGOs, journalists, and carbon credit rating agencies, have found significant quality problems across a range of carbon credits, undermining trust that they actually deliver what’s being claimed.” He told the Witness Radio team.

Further, he states that the issue is not carbon markets alone but how companies use or misuse carbon credits. Many credits overstate or fabricate climate benefits. And global polluters buy cheap credits to avoid reducing their own emissions.

“The problem is that in many cases carbon credits are being used by companies, and increasingly by countries, to claim that they’re net-zero or carbon-neutral. The use of carbon credits can have real-world consequences, potentially delaying internal climate action for some of the world’s heaviest polluters, who need to reduce their own emissions first and foremost, he adds.

Crook insists that carbon projects must never violate human rights, yet cases like Namwasa, Kikonda, and the Hoima TGB scheme show that abuses are not exceptions; they are symptoms of a systemic failure.