A six-month investigation reveals that many carbon credit ventures reap profits from public lands they have no right to and fail to share revenue with those protecting the forest.

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many of the private ventures have repeatedly and, authorities say, illegally laid claim to publicly protected lands, generating enormous profits from territory they have no legal right to and then failing to share the revenue with those who protected or lived on the land. The use of such lands to sell credits also contributes little to reducing carbon emissions.

  • The Post’s investigation is based on a review of thousands of pages of corporate and court records, interviews with dozens of people across the forest, and a geospatial analysis of carbon credit projects in the Amazon.

  • The Post analysis found no evidence that the purchasers acted improperly.

  • when polluting companies buy credits generated by supposedly preserving land that was already protected, their money contributes next to nothing.

“The system is very gameable,” said Joseph Romm, a climate researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. “And the victim is the planet, and all of humanity who suffers because we’re not reducing emissions, but get to pretend we are.”

  • So Barreto, often working on the case until 10 p.m., tracked down the deeds that appeared to show the lands were private, finding 34 in all.

  • Almost none of the deeds were valid.

  • Morioka began buying vast tracts of land in Portel. But […] Morioka had never received the official authorizations he’d needed for the acquisitions, rendering them invalid.

  • That didn’t stop several deals from being struck by Morioka in the early 2010s, effectively leasing the lands to carbon credit developers

  • One person appeared to have had a hand in every one of the projects she [Barreto] reviewed. “Michael Greene,” she said.

  • In the absence of government approval, companies like Greene’s have no right to carbon credits associated with Indigenous territories

  • [alternate view] Funai, the government’s Indigenous affairs agency, announced last year that the federal government, lacking a system of regulation, could not authorize deals involving Indigenous lands.

Still, Indigenous Carbon proceeded, reaping a windfall of carbon credits. And it did so by telling Cercarbono that the ventures had been the villagers’ idea. Greene’s company was only a consultant. But six former employees said Indigenous Carbon had been far more than a consultant — entering the territories, paying leaders to participate in unauthorized carbon credit deals and then seeking to conceal the company’s involvement.

“Have the leaders tell their people that they sought a company and contracted it to consult them on how to do the project,” Greene wrote to one employee in June 2022 in one of several WhatsApp messages reviewed by The Post. “Not that they were approached.”

“They need to say, ‘We did the project, without the help of a white man coming to our land,’” he wrote in another message in December 2022.

By late last year, an Indian firm hired by Greene verified six of the projects. Cercarbono then certified them all. They were allotted roughly 24 million credits, records show, worth $197 million at last year’s prices.