Tanzania is being held up simultaneously as a model of wildlife conservation, a frontier of carbon market opportunity, and a destination for responsible tourism investment. Each of these narratives carries genuine substance. Each of them also conceals a dynamic that has been unfolding across the country’s northern highlands, southern game reserves, and coastal forests for decades: the systematic displacement of communities from land they have stewarded for generations, justified by environmental and development rationales that international institutions, foreign investors, and the Tanzanian government have used interchangeably depending on what the moment required. Tracking this dynamic — the land politics that sit beneath conservation policy, carbon finance, and extractive sector development — is central to the investigative mission of Madini Today, which covers the intersection of resource industries, environment, and community rights in Tanzania with a consistency that no other dedicated outlet maintains.
This article examines what researchers have termed “green grabbing” — the appropriation of land and resources for environmental ends that nonetheless displace and impoverish the communities who live on and depend on that land. In Tanzania, the phenomenon operates through three overlapping mechanisms: fortress conservation that excludes pastoral and farming communities from protected areas, carbon credit schemes that commodify village land without adequate community consent or benefit, and tourism investment that requires the removal of human presence from landscapes valued for their visual emptiness. Understanding how these mechanisms interact — and how they connect to the broader political economy of Tanzania’s resource sector — is the work that investigative journalism about the Tanzanian environment is attempting to do.
The Maasai and Ngorongoro: A Conservation Crisis in Slow Motion
The Ngorongoro Conservation Area is one of the most internationally recognised landscapes in Africa. It holds three UNESCO designations — World Heritage Site, Biosphere Reserve, and Global Geopark. Its volcanic crater contains one of the densest wildlife populations on earth. It is also home to approximately 100,000 Maasai pastoralists who were relocated there from the Serengeti when that park was established in the 1950s, under a Multiple Land Use Model that was supposed to guarantee their rights alongside wildlife conservation.
That guarantee has been progressively dismantled over the following seven decades. When the Ngorongoro Conservation Area was established in the late 1950s, it held about 8,000 Maasai residents. The population grew to approximately 100,000 — and successive policy changes have responded to this growth not by expanding services or developing participatory management approaches, but by restricting Maasai access to land, water, and agricultural activity, withdrawing education and healthcare services, and eventually attempting to remove most of the population entirely.
The current displacement program, described by the government as “voluntary relocation,” has been rejected as coercive by community organisations, independent researchers, and United Nations human rights bodies. In August 2024, more than 40,000 Maasai pastoralists mobilised in protests against government efforts to relocate them from their lands. The scale of the mobilisation prompted President Samia Suluhu Hassan to meet with Maasai leaders and establish two Presidential Commissions to examine land disputes in Ngorongoro and Loliondo.
Those commissions — established in February 2025 after initial announcements in December 2024 — took over a year to produce reports, sharing no interim findings despite government statements that their recommendations would guide imminent policy decisions. In April 2026, UN experts warned that decisions affecting tens of thousands of Indigenous Peoples were being taken behind closed doors. “These reports are of profound public interest and must be made available to the public without delay,” they stated.
When the commission reports were finally submitted to President Hassan in March 2026, they recommended dismantling longstanding Maasai rights in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area — a conclusion that the Maasai International Solidarity Alliance (MISA) categorically rejected as rubber-stamping a predetermined government position. Three days after the reports were submitted, rangers from the Ngorongoro Conservation Area Authority arrested three residents in the Ndutu area and ordered them to vacate their land to make way for tourism expansion.
The Tanzanian government’s narrative frames the Maasai as threats to the ecosystem they inhabit — degrading land through livestock keeping, incompatible with the wildlife conservation that UNESCO listings require. Research tells a different story. Multiple scientific studies and IPCC and IPBES assessments affirm that Indigenous pastoral knowledge and land stewardship practices are among the most effective biodiversity conservation approaches available. The Maasai have coexisted with and actively managed the Ngorongoro ecosystem for longer than any of the conservation institutions now seeking their removal.
The Loliondo Confrontation: When Conservation Serves Tourism Investment
Forty kilometres north of Ngorongoro, the Loliondo Game Controlled Area has been the site of a parallel and overlapping land conflict with a more explicitly commercial dimension. In June 2022, the Tanzanian government unilaterally converted 1,500 km² of designated Maasai village land into the Pololeti Game Reserve — a decision made without the free, prior, and informed consent of the communities affected. Security forces used live ammunition against community members who resisted, severely wounding dozens and displacing thousands.
The commercial interest underlying this conversion was not conservation. Boston-based Thomson Safaris holds a long-contested land claim in the same area. In the immediate aftermath of the June 2022 violence and displacement, Thomson Safaris carried out a resurvey of its contested land claim. The sequence — government violence against community land defenders, followed immediately by a private tourism company advancing its contested territorial interest — illustrates the relationship between state enforcement capacity and private tourism investment that conservation advocacy frequently obscures.
Research published on this conflict describes the pattern as “green grabbing”: the taking of community land in the name of environmental protection, while the practical beneficiaries are tourism operators, conservation NGOs, and government entities whose interests align in maintaining landscapes emptied of the pastoral communities whose presence is reframed as incompatible with the conservation mission. The environmental justification is not fabricated — the conservation values of the land are real. What is fabricated is the incompatibility between those values and the presence of the communities who have maintained the land.
The REGROW Catastrophe: When the World Bank Finances Displacement
The Ngorongoro and Loliondo cases involve primarily government action with private commercial support. The REGROW project in southern Tanzania illustrates a third variant: international development finance enabling and legitimising state-led displacement under an environmental conservation framework.
REGROW was a USD 150 million World Bank initiative designed to expand Ruaha National Park in southern Tanzania. Its stated objectives included conservation and tourism development. Its implementation involved government-backed rangers in olive-green fatigues roaming through villages, seizing cattle, torching homes, and forcing communities from land that had supported their livelihoods for generations. The expansion of Ruaha National Park under REGROW would have evicted residents from 44 Indigenous villages, displacing over 84,000 people.
In January 2025, following intense scrutiny from human rights organisations and United Nations bodies, the World Bank halted funding for the project. The withdrawal came after evidence that communities were not merely inconvenienced by the conservation program but subjected to systematic violence. A journalist’s account from Mbarali District in February 2025 described the landscape of fear that REGROW had created — and the eerie quiet that followed the World Bank’s suspension of funding, as communities waited to understand whether the threat had genuinely receded or merely paused.
The REGROW case has become a reference point in international debates about the conditions under which development finance institutions should fund conservation projects. The World Bank’s Environmental and Social Framework — designed precisely to prevent the kinds of harm that REGROW enabled — failed to prevent them. The accountability mechanism that ultimately worked was not the Bank’s internal safeguards but external pressure from civil society organisations and affected communities who found channels to international bodies that the Tanzanian government could not as easily suppress.
Carbon Credits and the New Frontier of Green Grabbing
The most recent wave of land pressure in Tanzania comes not from traditional conservation or tourism investment but from the rapidly expanding carbon credit market. As global corporations seek to offset their greenhouse gas emissions through payments for carbon sequestration in forests and grasslands, Tanzania’s landscapes have become attractive investment targets — and the communities who live on those landscapes are being drawn into arrangements whose terms they frequently do not understand, did not meaningfully consent to, and from which they receive a fraction of the value generated.
Tanzania has become a magnet for carbon offset projects. From Loliondo in Arusha to Kiteto in Manyara, foreign firms and conservation groups are seeking land to capture carbon and sell credits to polluting industries in the Global North. Major players include Soils for the Future Tanzania Ltd, backed by Volkswagen Climate Partners and The Nature Conservancy, active in Longido, Monduli, and Simanjiro districts — areas that overlap significantly with Maasai grazing territory.
The government has signed carbon trading memoranda of understanding with multiple international entities, including a 2023 agreement with GreenCop Development PTE Ltd — a company incorporated in Singapore just six weeks before the signing. Tanzania also signed agreements with Blue Carbon LLC, a UAE-based carbon company that has pursued similar deals across multiple African countries covering tens of millions of hectares. The scale and pace of these commitments, combined with the opacity of their terms and the absence of meaningful community consultation, has generated serious concern among land rights researchers and community advocates.
Tanzania’s carbon market is growing fast but remains significantly under-regulated. The absence of clear tenure protection for communities whose land is being enrolled in carbon schemes creates conditions in which communities may find themselves bound by carbon credit agreements — which typically run for 30 to 100 years — without having understood what they agreed to, while the actual carbon revenue flows primarily to the foreign project developer, the international NGO partner, and the government, with community payments representing a small fraction of the total credit value.
The government projects potential revenue of up to TZS 2.4 trillion (approximately USD 900 million) from carbon credit projects. A carbon finance project in Kiteto and Mbulu districts disbursed TZS 4.7 billion to local residents in 2022 as compensation for their conservation activities — a genuinely positive outcome at the project level. But the aggregate picture is one in which the terms of carbon arrangements are determined by parties with far greater legal and financial sophistication than the communities whose land provides the carbon value, in a regulatory environment that does not yet provide communities with enforceable rights to adequate information or benefit sharing.
The Pattern Beneath the Projects: What Green Grabbing Looks Like in Practice
Green grabbing in Tanzania does not follow a single template. It operates through a variety of institutional arrangements — presidential decrees, game reserve conversions, national park expansions, carbon credit MoUs, tourism concession agreements — that share a common structure: community land and resource rights are subordinated to a conservation or climate rationale whose financial benefits flow primarily to non-community actors.
The tools of displacement are also varied. Physical eviction — the most visible form — has been documented in Ngorongoro, Loliondo, and the REGROW area. But more subtle mechanisms operate continuously. The withdrawal of education and healthcare services from communities in protected areas increases the effective cost of remaining. Restrictions on livestock movement and agricultural activity reduce the productivity of land communities are nominally permitted to occupy. The threat of future eviction, maintained through periodic enforcement actions and government statements, creates a chronic insecurity that affects investment decisions, social cohesion, and the willingness of community members to defend their rights formally.
Over 40% of Tanzania’s land area falls under Protected Areas — a proportion that continues to expand. The government’s expansion of conservation areas has systematically occurred at the expense of surrounding communities, leaving them with reduced land for agriculture and livestock-keeping. The Tanzanian government’s degradation narrative — framing pastoralists as destroyers of ecosystems rather than stewards of them — provides the ideological justification for this expansion while obscuring the research evidence that contradicts it.
The International Architecture of Green Grabbing
One of the most important features of green grabbing in Tanzania is its international dimension. The land pressures affecting Maasai communities and other rural populations in Tanzania are not primarily the product of local dynamics. They are enabled by, and in significant respects designed within, international frameworks: UNESCO’s World Heritage system, the World Bank’s conservation finance programs, the voluntary carbon market, bilateral conservation agreements between Tanzania and major donor countries, and the advocacy strategies of international NGOs whose conservation models have historically marginalised the communities embedded in the landscapes they seek to protect.
This international architecture provides resources, legitimacy, and sometimes direct operational support for the displacement of communities. It also provides accountability channels — the UN human rights mechanisms that have consistently spoken against Tanzania’s eviction programs, the World Bank’s accountability structures that civil society groups used successfully in the REGROW case, the international media coverage that amplifies community voices that Tanzanian authorities attempt to suppress.
The tension between these two roles — the international system as both enabler of green grabbing and as potential accountability mechanism — is one of the central dynamics of the land rights struggle in Tanzania. Civil society organisations have learned to use both: accessing international forums to raise visibility, filing formal complaints to development bank accountability mechanisms, engaging UN Special Rapporteurs, and building transnational advocacy networks that give Maasai community representatives platforms in Paris and Geneva that they cannot access in Dodoma.
The Accountability Gap: What Journalism Can and Cannot Reach
Investigative journalism about green grabbing in Tanzania faces a specific set of challenges that differ from those of mineral sector investigation. The communities most affected are geographically remote, politically marginalised, and in some cases subject to direct pressure — including arrests of activists and demolition of settlements — that creates real personal risk for sources. The institutions responsible for the policies being investigated include not just the Tanzanian government but international organisations — the World Bank, UNESCO, international NGOs — whose accountability processes are opaque in different ways from national government accountability.
The carbon credit dimension adds another layer of complexity. The financial arrangements between carbon project developers, verification bodies, international NGO partners, and community beneficiaries involve contracts, verification methodologies, and revenue sharing models of considerable technical complexity. Understanding whether a carbon credit scheme is genuinely benefiting communities or primarily extracting value from their land while delivering inadequate compensation requires the kind of financial investigation expertise that is rare in environmental journalism.
The Tanzania Environmental Governance Alliance (TEGA), a national coalition established in 2026, gives environmental land rights defenders a platform to share experiences and develop advocacy capacity. The work of organisations like SwedWatch and the Church of Sweden in Nyamongo — training community members in environmental monitoring, documenting human rights violations, building the evidentiary base for legal and advocacy action — represents the kind of ground-level accountability infrastructure that investigative journalism depends on but cannot replace.
What journalism can do — and what distinguishes investigative accountability from advocacy — is connect the specific and the systemic: link the arrest of three Ndutu residents in March 2026 to the commission process that preceded it, to the tourism interests that shaped it, to the international conservation framework that legitimises it, and to the decades of policy history that has progressively converted the Multiple Land Use Model of 1959 into a vehicle for displacement. That connective work — showing how individual incidents fit into institutional patterns — is what makes journalism about green grabbing genuinely accountable rather than merely sympathetic.
What Accountability in Conservation Finance Requires
The accountability gap in Tanzania’s green economy is not primarily a journalism problem. It is a governance problem that journalism can help to reveal but cannot resolve. Resolving it requires structural changes to the frameworks that currently enable green grabbing:
Free, prior, and informed consent — the international standard for decisions affecting Indigenous and community lands — must be enforced as a genuine requirement rather than a procedural formality. Communities must have access to independent legal advice before signing carbon credit agreements or consenting to conservation arrangements. The terms of those agreements must be publicly disclosed. And communities must have enforceable rights to dispute terms that do not meet minimum standards of equity and fairness.
Tanzania’s carbon market needs regulatory infrastructure that does not yet exist: clear tenure protections for communities whose land is being enrolled in carbon schemes, mandatory disclosure of revenue sharing arrangements, independent verification of community consent processes, and legal standing for communities to challenge agreements entered into without adequate consultation.
The World Bank and other international development finance institutions must enforce their own environmental and social standards with the rigour that the REGROW case demonstrated is not guaranteed. The accountability mechanisms that worked in REGROW — civil society pressure through international channels — should not be the primary safeguard for communities facing displacement. They should be the backup to institutional safeguards that function reliably without requiring affected communities to navigate complex international accountability processes from positions of extreme vulnerability.
And the UNESCO World Heritage system — which has granted international legitimacy to the Ngorongoro Conservation Area without the free, prior, and informed consent of its Indigenous residents — must confront the contradiction between its conservation mandate and its role in enabling the displacement of the people whose presence has maintained the ecosystem its designations are supposed to protect.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is green grabbing and how does it differ from regular land grabbing?
Green grabbing is the appropriation of land and resources justified by environmental rationales — conservation, carbon sequestration, biodiversity protection, or climate action — rather than straightforwardly commercial or agricultural objectives. The environmental justification distinguishes it from conventional land grabbing in form, but the effect on affected communities is similar or identical: loss of access to land, livelihoods, and resources, without adequate compensation or meaningful participation in the decisions that affect them. In Tanzania, green grabbing operates through national park expansions, game reserve conversions, carbon credit schemes, and conservation tourism arrangements that displace communities from land they have occupied and managed for generations.
What is happening to the Maasai in Ngorongoro?
Approximately 100,000 Maasai pastoralists live in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area under a Multiple Land Use Model established when the area was created in the late 1950s. The Tanzanian government has progressively restricted Maasai land access, agricultural activity, and service availability, and is pursuing a “voluntary relocation” programme that community organisations, UN human rights bodies, and independent researchers have characterised as coercive. In March 2026, two Presidential Commissions submitted recommendations that the Maasai International Solidarity Alliance rejected as rubber-stamping predetermined government plans to reduce human presence in the area and expand tourism. The UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights warned in August 2026 that Maasai peoples face forced evictions and law enforcement abuses.
What was the REGROW project and why was it halted?
REGROW was a USD 150 million World Bank initiative to expand Ruaha National Park in southern Tanzania. Its implementation involved government rangers seizing cattle, demolishing homes, and forcing communities from land designated for park expansion — affecting 44 Indigenous villages and potentially displacing over 84,000 people. In January 2025, the World Bank halted the project following intense scrutiny from human rights organisations and UN bodies. The REGROW case is now cited as a significant failure of the World Bank’s Environmental and Social Framework safeguards and a case study in how international conservation finance can enable rather than prevent community displacement.
How do carbon credit schemes affect Tanzanian communities?
Tanzania has become a significant destination for carbon offset investment, with foreign firms and conservation groups seeking to enroll large areas of village land in carbon credit schemes — some covering hundreds of thousands of hectares. Community members whose land is enrolled in these schemes may receive payments for conservation activities, but typically receive a small fraction of the total carbon credit value generated. Tanzania’s carbon market lacks adequate regulation: community tenure protections are weak, consent processes are frequently inadequate, and the agreements that bind community land for 30 to 100 years are negotiated between parties with vastly unequal legal and financial sophistication. The government projects potential revenue of up to USD 900 million from carbon projects; how much of this reaches the communities providing the land is far less clear.
What is the Loliondo conflict about?
The Loliondo Game Controlled Area in northern Tanzania, adjacent to Ngorongoro, has been the site of a long-running conflict between Maasai communities and the Tanzanian government over land that also involves the interests of a Boston-based tourism company, Thomson Safaris. In June 2022, the government converted 1,500 km² of designated Maasai village land into the Pololeti Game Reserve, using live ammunition against resisting community members. Thomson Safaris subsequently resurveyed its contested land claim in the same area. Researchers have characterised the sequence as illustrating how conservation narratives can serve commercial tourism interests while displacing the communities whose land use rights precede both the conservation designation and the tourism investment.
What role does international conservation play in enabling land dispossession?
International conservation institutions — UNESCO, the World Bank’s conservation finance programs, major international NGOs, and bilateral conservation partnerships — provide resources, legitimacy, and sometimes operational support for conservation programs that have displaced Tanzanian communities. UNESCO’s World Heritage designation for Ngorongoro was granted without the free, prior, and informed consent of its Maasai residents, and the designation has subsequently been used to justify restrictions on those residents’ land use. The same international system also provides accountability channels: UN Special Rapporteurs, World Bank accountability mechanisms, and international civil society networks that community advocates have used to challenge green grabbing. The tension between these two roles — enabler and accountability mechanism — defines how affected communities engage with international institutions.
What is free, prior, and informed consent and why does it matter?
Free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) is an international standard — enshrined in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and referenced in multiple development finance frameworks — that requires that decisions affecting Indigenous and community lands be made only with the genuine agreement of affected communities, reached without coercion, in advance of the decision, and on the basis of complete information about what is being proposed. In Tanzania’s conservation and carbon credit context, FPIC is frequently violated: communities sign agreements they do not fully understand, are subject to relocation programs described as voluntary while essential services are being withdrawn to make remaining untenable, and are excluded from commission processes whose findings will determine their future.
How can investigative journalism address green grabbing?
Investigative journalism about green grabbing contributes to accountability by connecting individual incidents to institutional patterns, documenting the gap between official conservation narratives and community experiences, tracing the financial arrangements that determine who benefits from carbon and conservation schemes, and providing communities with public platforms that they cannot access through formal governance channels. The connective work — showing how an individual arrest fits into a decades-long dispossession process enabled by international conservation frameworks — is what distinguishes journalism from advocacy and makes it useful to both community members and the policy actors who could change the conditions producing the harm. The investigative work is complementary to but distinct from community monitoring, civil society advocacy, and legal challenges — all of which also play roles in the accountability ecosystem that Tanzania’s land rights crisis requires.