African Parks has generated $7.35 million in carbon credit sales from Chinko National Park in the Central African Republic, Helge Mahne, global funding director for African Parks, confirmed to Mongabay in an email. An unspecified sum was also raised via sales from a similar project in Benin’s Pendjari and W national parks, although the nonprofit declined to share details about the buyer or revenue figures.
The credits were produced by two REDD+ projects, one at Chinko and another that includes Pendjari and W, so named for the shape of the Niger River at the park’s northern boundary. Both projects were co-developed by the Swiss climate consultancy firm South Pole and listed on the carbon certifier Verra’s registry.
According to their submission and verification documents, both projects generate carbon credits by protecting the parks’ forests and savannah grasslands, primarily from encroachment by local farmers and herders.
“Since both are REDD+ projects, they rely on the results from the reduction of threats that could affect the integrity of the protected areas, including overgrazing and slash-and-burn agriculture in Benin, and artisanal mining, livestock overgrazing and slash-and-burn agriculture in Central African Republic,” Mahne said.
The sales will help fund the management of the three protected areas, which are home to many endangered species. Pendjari and W national parks host some of West Africa’s last remaining elephants, and Chinko includes populations of lions as well as endangered chimpanzees and African wild dogs.
The project documents say that without African Parks’ presence, they would be severely degraded by livestock.
According to South Pole’s project’s description for Chinko, “Transhumance is the main direct driver of deforestation in the region, driven by transhumant pastoralists.”
Its most recent monitoring report, issued March 2025, said the carbon savings achieved by the project between 2021 and 2024 amounted to more than a million tons of carbon dioxide — around the total annual emissions of Sierra Leone.
All three parks have been the site of violent conflicts in recent years. Pendjari and W are currently active warzones, with intense fighting between Sahelian jihadist groups and the Beninese army. Earlier this year, more than 50 soldiers were killed in an attack inside Pendjari.
Researchers claim that, in the past, African Parks rangers dissuaded herders from bringing cattle into Pendjari by shooting and killing large numbers of the animals.
In June, the Pendjari and W project was granted an exemption from the normal requirement for on-site verification by Verra. The group declined to say whether violence at the two parks would trigger any additional review.
“We cannot share the criteria used to flag certain areas for review, but an understanding of the socio-political context a project operates in is fundamental to conducting our reviews,” said Anne Thiel, a director of communications at Verra.
Banner image of a herd of cattle at a water hole in Benin by Padonou Dotou via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
