After a two-year probe, the world’s largest certifier of carbon offsets has determined that most of the credits from a massive forest-protection project in Zimbabwe, which powered green claims of Volkswagen, Gucci, Nestle and McKinsey & Co., failed to benefit the atmosphere.

It’s a sharp blow to carbon markets, which have shrunk by more than two-thirds since 2021, amid ongoing concerns about the quality of carbon projects and a broader corporate pullback in climate action.

“This is a big deal,” said Grayson Badgley, a research scientist at Carbon Plan, a nonprofit that analyzes climate solutions. “I haven’t seen an investigation like this before.”

The probe by Verra, a nonprofit registry that issues more than half of the market’s carbon credits, focused on Kariba, a project that aimed t

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