Benefit-Sharing in Land-Based Carbon Projects: The Adequacy and Certainty of Zambia's Legal Framework

Abstract

This study asks whether Zambia's legal framework secures equitable and certain benefit-sharing in land-based carbon projects. Benefit-sharing denotes the legal arrangements by which the financial and non-financial returns from carbon projects are allocated among project developers, the State, landowners and host communities. The question is timely because Zambia has placed carbon trading on a statutory footing through the Green Economy and Climate Change Act, 2024 (hereinafter 'the GECC Act') and the Green Economy and Climate Change (Carbon Market) Regulations, 2026. Whether these instruments convert benefit-sharing into enforceable entitlements, rather than leaving it to the bargaining power of the parties, is the study's central concern. The study analyses the relevant statutes, subsidiary instruments and constitutional provisions and develops six evaluative criteria, namely clarity of carbon rights, statutory specificity, enforceability, transparency and accountability, participation and constitutional alignment, drawn from the literature on distributive justice, fiduciary stewardship, property rights and political economy and from the Paris Agreement, the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in developing countries (REDD+) safeguards and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. These criteria are then applied, provision by provision, to the Zambian framework and to the comparator jurisdictions, so that the assessment rests on stated standards rather than impression. Applying these criteria, the study finds the framework procedurally elaborate but substantively under-determined. Section 22 of the Act vests carbon in the President without articulating the derivative entitlements of communities and landowners; section 21(7) makes the community development and benefit-sharing agreement conditional on an undefined 'where applicable' test and defers its content to regulation; and the Carbon Market Regulations introduce a volume-based share of proceeds and a model template but prescribe no minimum community share, no formula and no accessible enforcement pathway. The framework therefore performs poorly on clarity of carbon rights, statutory specificity and enforceability, and is open to question on constitutional alignment with Article 255 of the Constitution and the principle of legality. Comparative analysis of Kenya and Tanzania yields five reform principles: a statutory minimum community allocation (Kenya prescribes forty per cent of land-based project earnings); an upstream recognition of carbon rights; a registry-based transparency infrastructure; community-accessible enforcement pathways; and an operational free, prior and informed consent standard. The study concludes that the framework codifies the architecture of carbon trading without codifying the architecture of carbon justice and recommends targeted amendments to the Act and the Regulations to recognise carbon rights, fix a minimum community share, make benefit-sharing a precondition of authorisation, require consent and mandate public disclosure. The study is confined by the novelty of the framework and the limited Zambian case law and literature on the post-2024 architecture, but it offers a doctrinal foundation for the legislative reform that equitable and certain benefit-sharing in Zambia now requires.