A Coalition of Representative Organizations Submit Recommendations to Enhance Social integrity of Jurisdictional Carbon Markets
While the proliferation of forest carbon markets across Latin America has created important opportunities to access new channels of finance, it has also created confusion and concern for Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities in understanding their rights to program benefits as well as the risks associated with these markets, especially concerning self-governance and self-determination, land tenure, territorial and carbon rights, access to justice, and respect for human rights.
The Architecture for REDD+ Transactions, better known by its acronym ART, is the standard body responsible for overseeing TREES 2.0 (The REDD+ Environmental Excellence Standard), the standard of choice for the LEAF Coalition’s $1+ Billion USD in financing for forest protection. Such funding commitments signal significant demand for TREES credits, which under ART’s jurisdictional-level programming are designed to represent impact at scale on countries’ deforestation and forest restoration efforts.
Over the past several years, the TREES 2.0 standard has been put to practice as national and subnational initiatives mobilize to meet the demand of buyers with their own supplies of forest carbon credits. However, the issuance of TREES credits has occurred for the first and only time, to date, in Guyana, which produced mixed results from Indigenous communities on the ground in terms of ensuring and verifying communities’ Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) and their meaningful participation in the design of the program. Meanwhile, communities throughout Latin America are learning, oftentimes the hard way, the real risks associated with existing mechanisms at the project level that need to be addressed for any carbon market to operate with social integrity.
In this context, the opening of the first public review of the TREES standard over the course of 2024-2025 represents a pivotal opportunity to strengthen the rights of Indigenous Peoples as well as those of Local Communities, and to send a signal for how to achieve social integrity throughout the forest carbon market. In response, leaders of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities came together to discuss and agree on the key changes they hope to see in order to respect, protect, and fulfill their rights under the ART program. Over the course of the fall, Rainforest Foundation US and Rainforest Foundation Norway facilitated a working group to develop recommendations, which were ultimately submitted to the ART Secretariat and Board of Directors on December 18, 2024. Their hope is to see ART’s crediting program “to be a driver of positive change and create an impetus to advance and strengthen tenure rights, a cornerstone for an equitable and effective jurisdictional program”.
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