How carbon markets can work for Global South communities: lessons from forest conservation failures

A new commentary on Mongabay argues that voluntary carbon markets have consistently fallen short of their promise to protect forests and support local communities. The author points to widespread issues with phantom credits, overestimated emissions reductions, and a structural failure to make Indigenous and community stewards the primary beneficiaries of carbon finance. The piece calls for a fundamental redesign where communities receive the majority of financial value from forest carbon projects, not a token share after developers and intermediaries take their cut. It highlights documented cases of land dispossession and exploitation in REDD+ projects across the Amazon, Southeast Asia, and Central Africa, and argues that conservation finance that alienates local guardians undermines both social justice and ecological outcomes.