- Fourteen organizations representing Indigenous peoples and local communities across Central and South America submitted recommendations to Architecture for REDD+ Transactions (ART) to demand transparent and inclusive carbon market standards at the jurisdictional level.
- The three major recommendations call for more transparency, inclusivity and accountability in jurisdictional programs of the voluntary carbon market through ensuring rights, free, prior and informed consent, and improved access to fair and equitable benefit-sharing.
- Analyzing the shortcomings of voluntary carbon markets surrounding their standards and certification, the signatories are demanding robust mechanisms that existing standards fail to meet or national legislation fails to implement.
- While opinions on voluntary carbon markets remain largely divided, Indigenous leaders and researchers say properly implementing these recommendations can help the carbon market address a $4.1 trillion gap in nature financing by 2050 and support communities.
For Indigenous peoples and local communities across Central and South America, financial opportunities from voluntary carbon markets come with both benefits and risks.
Working with the Rainforest Foundation Norway and Rainforest Foundation US, 14 organizations representing Indigenous peoples and local communities across the region have submitted a letter of recommendations to increase the benefits and reduce the risks. The letter was addressed to the Architecture for REDD+ Transactions (ART) Secretariat and Board while it reviews its REDD+ Environmental Excellence Standard, or TREES. TREES is ART’s standard for the quantification, monitoring, reporting and verification of greenhouse gas emission reductions and removals from REDD+ activities.
“It is of fundamental importance if we want to have sustainability in the carbon market that there is the voice of Indigenous peoples within this debate,” Mauricio Terena, from the Brazilian Indigenous association APIB, one of the signatories of the letter, said in a press statement. “These recommendations were made so that the carbon market does not become a violator of rights but fulfills its mission to bring environmental services.”
The three key recommendations, they say, will strengthen Indigenous peoples’ and local communities’ rights, access to benefit sharing, and equal participation in decision-making in jurisdictional carbon market programs (transactions done at the national or region level, instead of private forest carbon projects). The letter also includes legal frameworks to implement concerning Indigenous peoples, especially as some states lack regulation and legislation to protect their rights.
To achieve their goal, signatories say there needs to be meaningful participation and consultation with Indigenous peoples and local communities in designing jurisdictional programs while ensuring fair and equitable benefit sharing and strengthening quality control through an improved certification process and establishing an independent grievance mechanism.
“The recommendations sent to ART were built based on the challenges and risks experienced by the signatories,” said Julia Naime from the Rainforest Foundation Norway. “This was necessary because the standards in the voluntary carbon market need to be strong, verifiable, and robust to adequately respect and fulfil rights that are protected in international laws and norms.”
Indigenous and local community organizations said in a press statement that they lack access to understanding many facets of carbon market programs and are systematically excluded from decision-making. This, they said, leaves them more susceptible to risks from carbon markets and affects their customary rights to land, territory, and ecosystem services.
“That’s what happened in Ecuador in 2023 when the government adopted new standards to regulate the voluntary carbon credit market without meaningful consultation with Indigenous Peoples,” Majo Andrade Cerda from CONFENIAE, an association of Amazonian Indigenous peoples and signatory to the letter, said in the press statement. “To guarantee our rights and build trust, our perspectives must be central to the design of any climate change mitigation program or standard including ART TREES.”
While jurisdictional REDD+ is a funding mechanism that has received support from a few communities for forest protection like in the Brazilian Amazon, issues with free, prior and informed consent and lack of integrity in carbon credits have surfaced in the implementation of the TREES standard. This has cropped up, for instance, in the verification process in Costa Rica and in the initial issuance of credits in Guyana that led to Indigenous human rights group filing a formal complaint against ART over lack of consultation.
A recent report by Carbon Market Watch shows serious shortcomings in how ART TREES receives and handles grievances. Anticipating the gaps limiting the access to recourse for those affected by carbon market projects, the report says that while the ART grievance mechanism procedure has introduced safeguards, they often lack sufficient detail to be fully effective.
Sandra Dalfiume, one of the report authors, said these gaps exist particularly in ensuring the independence of complaint-handling representatives.
“The failure to provide meaningful remedies to vulnerable groups, as seen in the grievance submitted by the Amerindian Peoples’ Association (APA) of Guyana to the ART TREES’ grievance mechanism, underscores some of these weaknesses,” Dalfiume told Mongabay.
Despite a lengthy process, she said, “ART TREES dismissed the grievance on purely procedural grounds, failing to address critical concerns about whether free, prior, and informed consent of Indigenous and local communities was properly followed.”
To ensure Indigenous peoples’ perspectives and experiences are reflected in every process, ART communications adviser Brad Kahn said they’ve formed an advisory group that includes networks and coalitions of Indigenous and local communities in Africa and South America to ensure inclusivity and support the 2024-2025 review process.
Kahn said they’ve recently launched a process to develop a new type of certification to objectively demonstrate the impacts of REDD+ programs that go beyond greenhouse gas emission reductions and removals.
He added ART anticipates the new co-benefit certification to be published for public comment in the first quarter of 2025.
“When finalized, we hope this will serve as another pathway to incentivize jurisdictional REDD+ program design and implementation that strengthens Indigenous and local communities and rights,” Kahn told Mongabay.
While the voluntary carbon market has the potential to address a gap of $4.1 trillion in nature financing by 2050 and support Indigenous peoples and local communities, Indigenous leaders say respecting communities’ rights, decision-making and meaningful participation are nonnegotiable.
Rather than be seen as either obstacles or mere beneficiaries, Indigenous peoples and local communities must be engaged with as partners to realize high-integrity credits in the voluntary carbon markets, Naime said. “Failing to do so will continue to undermine the credibility and confidence of the market as a whole,” she told Mongabay.
Signatories to the letter say they anticipate the publication of the new TREES standard to come out later this year. Once published, the draft of the reviewed version will be open to public comment for a period of 60 days.
Banner image: Melquiades, a Brazil nut producer in the Amazon rainforest. Image by Yoly Gutierrez/CIFOR via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).
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