Beyond the Carbon Hype: Navigating the real costs and opportunities of voluntary and compliance carbon markets in the Sahel
A blog by Emma Catalfamo and Nathan Kably, Frontier Tech Hub Coaches, and Mana Farooghi, FCDO Pioneer and Sahel Adviser; with inputs from Sand to Green and Boomitra
Made using AI
The Drylands pilot kicked off in early 2024 to leverage the potential of global carbon markets to finance environmental restoration in the Sahel. The Sahel region is particularly vulnerable to risks due to environmental degradation. It is also home to several land regeneration efforts, such as the African Union’s Great Green Wall agenda and efforts to unlock carbon finance to accelerate that agenda, such as those led by the World Economic Forum. Through the Frontier Tech Hub, our team set out to understand the potential of carbon sequestration in drylands environments and work toward connecting a fragmented ecosystem of actors crowding in carbon finance in the Sahel.
We started by exploring the voluntary market, assuming it was a faster and more direct way to get carbon finance into less stable contexts, but encountered contextual challenges related to costs, buyer confidence, and how to appropriately value credits for below-ground soil carbon sequestration. For a full picture of carbon finance opportunities, we then explored the compliance market, where we saw potential for large-scale impact using satellite data but faced barriers to accessing quality ground-truthing data. This blog details our journey using technology to navigate carbon markets and the lessons we learned along the way.
Exploring the Voluntary Carbon Market with Sand to Green
The first half of the pilot focused on the Voluntary Carbon Market (VCM) with Sand to Green, a Moroccan-French company specialising in transforming drylands into productive farmland, leading the technical implementation. The VCM is a decentralised marketplace for buyers and sellers to trade carbon credits. It is an open system where companies, organisations, and even individuals purchase carbon credits on a voluntary basis to offset their emissions or meet corporate sustainability targets. This flexibility has made the VCM a testing ground for innovative approaches, but it also means that methodologies and standards are less uniform.
The Sand to Green team launched their work with a site visit to Senegal to learn directly from farmers about the extent of ongoing land regeneration practices in the area, as well as their needs in terms of accessing carbon markets. Through this visit, the team learned about the crucial role of trusted intermediaries, in particular farmer cooperatives or NGOs, who are already connected with communities and play a key role in ensuring both the adoption and sustainability of regenerative interventions. We also learned that these groups know about carbon markets but are looking for partners to support their members to access them to finance their agroecological transitions.
Image credit: Sand to Green
The team engaged a carbon markets expert, Alison Filler, through the Frontier Tech Hub to learn more about navigating carbon credit hurdles as a new project developer in a market ripe with barriers to entry. A causal chain workshop showcased the various pathways open to project developers entering the market, like identifying target buyers and developing a go-to-market strategy that would offer the most efficient and direct route to selling carbon credits. Through this exercise, Sand to Green identified Plan Vivo as the standard body through which they would certify their credits due to its community-centred approach and flexibility, which they feel is well-suited to small-scale farming in arid regions. Plan Vivo’s emphasis on participatory certification and equitable benefit sharing would ensure that carbon credits respect both ecosystems and local communities, important aspects to both our team and potential buyers.
The Sand to Green team wrapped up their engagement with the Frontier Tech Hub by producing a carbon market playbook, which lays out their own strategy and offers insights for similar startups looking to enter the VCM. From this first half of the pilot, we came to understand that the mismatch between the VCM and drylands contexts is quite consequential: most legacy methods were developed around temperate or tropical systems where above-ground biomass is the dominant, easier-to-measure pool. Drylands, by contrast, are highly heterogeneous and often store a large share of carbon below ground (soil and roots), which is harder and costlier to measure with traditional field sampling; default factors and models therefore don’t translate easily.
A software like Sand to Green’s could bridge that gap by modelling CO₂ sequestration for different dryland tree and shrub species and by incorporating below-ground (root and soil) estimates alongside above-ground growth to better capture total sequestration potential. While standards are beginning to catch up — for example, Verra’s Improved Agricultural Land Management methodology explicitly includes soil organic carbon, and Verra has approved guidance for digital soil-mapping approaches to estimate SOC — consensus and practical, low-cost methods for many dryland systems are still evolving, which leaves communities and project developers at a disadvantage when demonstrating full impact and negotiating appropriate prices for credits.
Standards and projects that want to successfully incorporate drylands typically require three things: (1) local calibration data for species-specific above- and below-ground growth and soil turnover rates, because dryland soils and vegetation respond very differently to rainfall and disturbance than humid ecosystems; (2) new measurement toolchains (remote sensing + digital soil mapping / machine learning) to reduce the cost and sampling burden of soil carbon monitoring; and (3) methodology modules that explicitly model root biomass and multiple soil layers, and that account for higher variability and reversal risk (drought, fire, degradation).
This is exactly the direction registries and projects are taking: recent Verra-registered projects (and the first Verra-approved digital soil mapping tool) demonstrate how remote sensing and modelling can make SOC quantification feasible at scale — this includes Boomitra’s Northern Mexico grassland project.
Pivoting to the Compliance Market with Boomitra
After these early learnings on the voluntary carbon market, we flipped the coin and pivoted towards an exploration of the compliance market. Compared to the VCM, which is open to individuals or organisations looking to purchase carbon credits to offset their emissions, the compliance market is a system through which governments can meet their climate action plans (also known as Nationally Determined Contributions) submitted through the Paris Agreement. The compliance market sets a price for carbon emitted by actors in the country’s system, making it more costly for high-emitting institutions to pollute, and enables countries to sell carbon credits to each other to cooperate on emissions reductions at a global level.
Boomitra, the implementing partner for the latter half of the pilot, uses satellite and AI technology to measure, report, and verify soil carbon credits across the globe. With experience using their technology, which employs machine learning models based on thousands of soil samples obtained through public and private sources, to facilitate bilateral trades in the compliance market, Boomitra set out to explore Senegal’s market potential based on its soil organic carbon stock from existing regeneration efforts. The team started by exploring partnerships through which to gather the local farm data required to ground-truth soil organic carbon sequestration calculations using their approach.
We faced a significant obstacle – the data we needed was hard to track down in the timeframe available. We had to compromise by using data from similar plots in Kenya that employ similar agricultural practices to run a comparative analysis that could be extrapolated, with limitations, to Senegal. The Boomitra team found that there have been measurable improvements in soil fertility and carbon capture from these practices in recent years, that scaling regenerative practices is feasible, and that sequestration rates could, on average, equate to 1.678 carbon credits per hectare, demonstrating strong eligibility for carbon finance markets. The team estimate that these levels could result in farmers earning between $9-$28 per hectare, annually. See their full report here.
According to the Boomitra team, there is significant potential for Senegal to restore degraded lands while securing financial incentives for smallholder farmers through the compliance market. Digital monitoring, reporting, and verification (DMRV) systems like their own could increase carbon credit integrity and could help position Senegal as a leader in climate-smart agriculture.
Moving Beyond the Hype: The role of technology
Through the pilot, the team at Sand to Green learned that cost models in the carbon market are highly sensitive, which can make it hard for projects to make informed and robust costing assumptions. Indeed, a significant proportion of the budget in nature-based carbon crediting projects can go into measuring carbon sequestration, and DMRV technologies like Boomitra’s can help reduce those costs and improve credit integrity, leaving more revenue on the table to be distributed.
The hurdles we faced trying to access local data in Senegal suggest that better, more integrated collaboration within the ecosystem is required to realise full market potential. Other Frontier Tech Hub research has also argued for better data security mechanisms to enhance data sharing capabilities within carbon markets. While tech is not a silver bullet to improving market access and success, our team believes it can improve credit quality and, if combined with other market access mechanisms, could unlock significant potential for communities in the Sahel.
There is a lot of enthusiasm for carbon markets as an alternative funding mechanism in the Sahel. Throughout this journey, we started to ask ourselves – are we chasing unicorns? Working on this pilot, we learned about the sometimes unknown costs involved in engaging with carbon markets – such as the upfront investments, the skills and capacity required, costs involved in ensuring integrity and fair benefit sharing, and the competition inherent in the VCM that hinders collaboration opportunities and transparency. We believe that actors must be aware of and prepared for the hurdles they will very likely encounter to appropriately calibrate how we respond to demand for carbon markets projects to realise the market’s full potential.
If you’d like to dig in further
🚀 Explore this pilot’s profile page
📚 Read Sand to Green’s Carbon Markets Playbook
📚 Read Boomitra’s Soil Organic Carbon Feasibility Analysis Report
Date uploaded: 23/09/2025
