“Green Finance” Promises to Save the Planet. It’s Doing the Opposite | The Walrus (thewalrus.ca)

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Rolando Zumba, a gentle fifty-nine-year-old, wept through an Associated Press interview as he described the displacement of his people and their traditional lands to make way for a giant carbon offset project. His own ability to hunt disappeared when rangers in Peru’s Cordillera Azul National Park—a spectacular 13,500-kilometre sweep of Amazon rainforest, mountains, and waterfalls—confiscated his hunting rifles. The act ended self-sufficiency for his Kichwa tribe on its ancestral land, ensuring poverty and hunger for his people.

In a December 2022 exposé, the news agency reported that this project was flawed from the beginning. The carbon credit program was set up in 2008 to “offset” the carbon footprint of Shell and TotalEnergies, which purchased blocks of the park, allowing them to claim more than 28 million “credits,” meaning they were theoretically offsetting that much CO2. The project brought in so much money, it covered around 90 percent of the operating expenses of the park and was supposed to be used for forest protection and reforestation. But the AP exposé found that not only did the companies exaggerate the credits earned, tree cover loss in the park also dramatically increased due to increased deforestation.

The market approach to nature is now deeply entrenched in many governments and international institutions, and trading in nature’s “assets” is a huge business. Most people around the world know little or nothing about this fast-moving development. But its reach is astounding.

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this post was submitted on 11 May 2026

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