A global campaign to make carbon markets fair

Communities around the world are increasingly approached by carbon credit projects promising to fight climate change. But they experience some of the same power imbalances that communities face with destructive projects like fossil fuel extraction, often resulting in unfair agreements made without proper consent.

Over the last year, our network members aligned around six core principles to ensure carbon projects respect community rights and leadership, while insisting that carbon payments cannot be a substitute for reducing avoidable emissions. As Andrew Zelemen, a community advocate from Liberia put it:

“Where there are carbon projects, the community should be part of the development of the project, the implementation, and the outcome.”

Our country teams and network members are using the Carbon Justice Principles to influence global policy, national legislation, and project negotiations – and we’re making progress.

In 2024, we successfully advocated for improvements to the UN’s environmental and human rights protections and grievance mechanism for carbon projects. Partnerships with donors like the Legal Empowerment Fund and researchers like Carbon Market Watch ensured that our network members had the resources and the knowledge to directly engage in policy discussions in the lead up to COP29.

Through press coverage in outlets like The Telegraph and Deutsche Welle, we built momentum for fair carbon markets that genuinely serve both climate and community needs.

We brought frontline justice advocates together to develop a toolkit on how to use the Carbon Justice Principles to make better national policy. Network members in Zambia, the Philippines, Kenya, and South Africa have already started to influence policy by putting it to use.

We also supported network members to build their capacities to respond to carbon projects, convening, for example, an online course in Latin America with over 200 participants and partnering with the Vance Center to create a model carbon contract for communities.

As a result of our work on the ground with communities and our network’s collective action, we have been invited, alongside Global Land Alliance, to inform a revision of the Verra standard, the most widely used framework for certifying carbon projects. This is an opportunity to turn the Carbon Justice Principles into actionable, binding requirements to reshape the market worldwide.

Across these efforts, our goal was clear: protect the rights and interests of communities.