Sometime towards the end of the 2021 wet season, Abel Carrasco’s home in the Alto Mayo protected area was razed to the ground with chainsaws, axes and ropes, he tells the Guardian. The 39-year-old coffee farmer, his pregnant wife and eight children were instructed not to return by park authorities.
“My children begged them but [the police] said they had to follow their orders. They told us to get our things ready and leave. They said it’s a protected forest, nobody can be here. That’s why you’ve got to go,” Carrasco said in September last year. He was tearful as he watched the video his teenage daughter recorded of the incident, the silence of the forest broken by the sound of his children crying over chainsaws.
The Guardian had come to Alto Mayo, on the western edge of the Peruvian Amazon, as part of an ongoing investigation into forest-based carbon offsetting. The project in this protected area is known as a flagship scheme, hailed as a success story for the booming $2bn (£1.6bn) voluntary market in the west, with dozens of companies and organisations buying credits for their net-zero claims.
This project has a special significance to Disney, with Alto Mayo credits making up about 40% of the company’s offsets between 2012 and 2020, according to its annual reports, in theory cancelling out rising emissions from cruise ships and theme parks. Coffee from Alto Mayo has even been sold at Disney’s parks and resorts.
While many of the Verra-approved offsetting projects examined by Guardian journalists showed little or no success in stopping deforestation, Alto Mayo was one of a handful that did get results, stopping about 3,329 hectares (8,226 acres) of forest from disappearing until 2020, according to a new study published by a group of international researchers. The researchers calculated that the project deserved about 720,000 carbon credits, which is admirable (although less than the 7.5m claimed through Verra’s system).
But there were also rumours of trouble at the project. It might have been achieving positive results in stopping deforestation, but a Bloomberg investigation in 2020 had found that the project appeared to have sewn conflict and disharmony among the communities there.
It is impossible not to be filled with awe at the sights and sounds of the world’s largest rainforest at its healthiest. In this part of Peru, roads end and the Amazon is often only passable on foot or by boat. Under the tree canopy, epiphytes hang from the branches and trunks, surviving on the moisture from the regular rains. Armies of ants scour the forest floor and low-lying foliage, recycling nutrients around the roots of enormous trees.
The project covers land twice the size of New York city in the foothills of the Andes, the cloud-covered peaks home to spectacled bears and hundreds of orchid species. In the hamlets of Alto Mayo, there seem to always be coffee beans drying in the sun, and life ebbs and flows around the men working in the fields, heading back home for lunch with machetes in hand.
Deforestation was a growing threat to the forest, thanks to illegal logging and expanding agricultural demands in the lowlands, but in 2009 a donation from Disney launched a massive conservation effort. The model is based around discouraging more people from moving to the forest while encouraging residents to sign conservation agreements, and has generated around $45m so far from the sale of the credits. The Guardian visited beekeeping and birdwatching projects part-funded by the credits by Conservation International, along with an orchid husbandry scheme in isolated villages on the edge of Alto Mayo.
Proponents of voluntary carbon markets say schemes like Alto Mayo should be urgently scaled up to help end deforestation globally, a “nature-based solution” that is vital in limiting global heating to 1.5C and meeting a new target to protect 30% of Earth for nature. Conservation International’s conservation finance executive is part of a Mark Carney initiative to scale up the voluntary carbon market, providing much-needed climate finance in rural areas in tropical regions.
US NGO Conservation International, which runs the project with the country’s national park service, said it is one of the world’s few projects of its kind to have continued success. Days before the Guardian visited, Verra cited it as a good example of how carbon finance can provide a lifeline to communities living in and around those forests in response to the ridiculing of offsetting from US satirist John Oliver.
But during the visit to Alto Mayo, the Guardian found evidence that while some local people are supportive of the scheme, others say they have been forced from their homes by park authorities, in a series of clearances between January and May 2021.
Villagers here are mostly ronderos, members of autonomous peasant groups that were formed in the 1980s as a response to murders by the separatist Maoist Shining Path terrorists. Today, they operate in Peruvian civil society and are recognised by law, protecting their communities in the absence of state support in rural areas.
Even though many Alto Mayo residents have lived in the forest for decades, they have no formal right to be in the protected area. Many moved from the Andes before Alto Mayo became a protected area or bought land not knowing it was protected before the creation of the offsetting scheme. It is a profoundly complicated situation, as the teams running the project acknowledge.
Some residents do not want to leave – but also do not want to sign the conservation agreements. Some fear that signing means they are giving up the right to live in their homes and smallholds, and a few of those groups have resisted with force in the past. Park guards have been kidnapped, there have been violent clashes with police, and the Conservation International head was forced to flee the area, first reported in a Bloomberg article in 2020. Hundreds of local people have chosen not to renew the conservation agreements and say even those that have signed were among those whose homes have been demolished.
In total, the Guardian spoke with eight people, including Carrasco, who said they had had their homes torn down between January and May 2021, including a 57-year-old woman and her disabled son and a 25-year-old woman with four children; with some providing video evidence, saying that about 50 homes had been demolished by park guards and police.
Villagers said the majority were taken down on Mother’s Day in May 2021, when people were visiting families in surrounding villages, and the clearances stopped after an emergency appeal. They said the park is being increasingly militarised with the creation of police bases for heavily armed patrols.
Ángela Carrasco, a 57-year-old who says she is part of a coffee cooperative that Conservation International organises, said her forest home was also torn down last year, traumatising her son, Ovidio.
“I have a disabled boy, he is special. He was screaming and crying when they tore the house down. There were others before me. Mine was one of three houses they demolished. They threatened us and said they had warned us,” she says.
“They came at night and took the house down at six in the morning. They arrived by helicopter with axes, ropes, guns, masked-up. Like ghosts. They didn’t want us to know who they were.”
Conservation International said it takes the reports very seriously and had been assured by Sernap that no homes that were inhabited had been cleared. It had been assured that any structures shown being dismantled by the park authorities were abandoned and the community had been informed well ahead of time that the buildings were to come down. Disney referred the Guardian to Conservation International for comment.
The Guardian has been able to verify some but not all of the footage that was shared by local people, but has shared it with Conservation International, which has said it would conduct an independent review of the videos and make the results public.
Sernap said that accusations of human rights abuse did not correspond with reality and were based on errors. It added that parts of the protected area had experienced illegal logging and land-grabbing, and it was its duty to protect the area.
Conservation International also raised concerns about the methodology used by the scientists in the studies analysed by the Guardian.
Perhaps some of these problems are specific only to Alto Mayo. But it is also possible that they are reflective of a larger problem with carbon offsetting projects, where “outsiders” turn up and seem to be telling people how to live in the land they have called home all their lives.
“Rainforest protection projects are often carried out in jurisdictions with a history of complex land tenure challenges, violent forced evictions in some cases and lengthy armed conflicts that make understanding true land tenure rights and particular indigenous customary land rights difficult,” says Kelsey Alford-Jones, a Phd student at UC Berkeley who is researching land rights at these offsetting projects.
“[Alto Mayo] is not an isolated case. There do seem to be numerous examples where communities have been violently evicted.”
The main rondero leader in Alto Mayo, Manuel Flores, says that he wants to live in peace and work with the project to conserve the rainforest while being allowed to maintain his farms.
“Nobody here can live in peace but there is nowhere else to go. If the authorities supported us more, there would be more guarantees for the future of the forest,” he says.
Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield on Twitter for all the latest news and features
