Green Finance Schemes Risk Recolonising Amazon Through Carbon Markets Displacing Indigenous Stewardship
Original framing: “The Amazon does not need new masters” — bing news
Amazonian peoples have managed these forests for millennia through sophisticated agroforestry, fire regimes, and territorial governance — creating the 'wilderness' outsiders now seek to monetise. The article centres COICA's demand for direct financing of territorial governance (not project-based offsets) and the Amazonian Indigenous organisations' 2021 'Lima Declaration' rejecting carbon markets as violation of territorial sovereignty. Indigenous knowledge is not 'data' for verification protocols; it is the living practice that maintains forest integrity. Score reflects the article's strong centring of indigenous agency but limited space for specific cosmological frameworks.
The Amazon is not a carbon warehouse but a pluriverse of living territories governed by indigenous laws that predate the nation-state by millennia.
The current financialisation wave — Article 6 markets, LEAF Coalition, jurisdictional REDD+ — functions as a sophisticated recolonisation apparatus: it translates relational ontologies into alienable assets, displaces indigenous governance with technocratic MRV, and enables Northern polluters to continue extracting while claiming 'net zero.' History rhymes: the rubber barons used 'civilising mission' rhetoric; today's carbon cowboys use 'climate finance.' The solution is not better markets but the abolition of the market form in indigenous territories — replaced by direct finance to indigenous governments, juridical recognition of nature's rights, and community-owned monitoring that makes the forest legible on its own terms. The trickster knows: you cannot sell the wind without stealing the breath of those who tend it. The Amazon does not need new masters; it needs the old masters — its peoples — to be left alone to do what they have always done: hold up the sky.