Carbon colonialism: The Makira REDD project in Madagascar
“The forest remained. The cost was absorbed within the community.”
Tom Corcoran is a conservation ethnographer with more than 40 years experience working with communities in 30 countries. Five years ago, Corcoran founded ETHNOMAD, which he describes as “an independent ethnographic research and advisory practice”.
In the most recent issue of ETHNOMAD’s Fading Cultures Magazine, Corcoran has written an article titled “Carbon Elsewhere: How climate responsibility is being displaced.” It’s an excellent article and well worth reading in full.
He starts the article with his first encounter with carbon offsetting in a forest in northeastern Madagascar in 2008. This was the Makira Forest Protected Area REDD+ Project run by the Wildlife Conservation Society. It covers an area of 372,000 hectares and is one of the largest remaining rainforests in Madagascar.
About 90,000 people live in 120 villages in the project area.
Corcoran describes how REDD was explained to the people who lived in Makira, in Malagasy, French, and “the technical language of conservation”.
Corcoran writes that,
What struck me then, and has stayed with me since, was not hostility but uncertainty. The communities of Makira did not reject carbon offsetting. They simply did not know what it was. They were being asked to participate in a system that operated on timescales, markets, and legal abstractions far beyond their experience. The forest they knew was being redefined as a global asset, while their own relationship to it was becoming conditional. Carbon offsetting did not arrive as a choice. It came as a future already shaped elsewhere.
Project documents reveal that the decision to develop the Makira carbon project dates back to 2001 — and Corcoran’s comment that this is “a future already shaped elsewhere” is spot on:
In 2001, during an International Symposium on sustainable financing for Protected Areas, carbon financing was identified as one instrument that could be used to financially support environmental action. As a result of the symposium, it was then recommended to initiate a pilot project to test carbon-financing mechanisms. As a follow up to this symposium, International Resources Group (IRG), through a USAID-funded project, and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) have been working with Madagascar’s Ministry of Water and Forests (MEF) to develop carbon financing options to enhance conservation of the Makira forest in north-eastern Madagascar.
“Selling the wind”
I wrote about the Makira REDD project in 2010, based on a report of conference at the University of East Anglia a few months earlier. I quoted a presentation at the conference by Barry Ferguson who has worked for many years in Madagascar. Ferguson’s presentation was titled “The strangers, they’re selling the wind”. That’s how local people talked about the Makira REDD project.
In 2006, Conservation International was boasting on its website that it had sold carbon credits to the Dixie Chicks and to Pearl Jam at US$10 each. Pearl Jam started buying Makira carbon offsets from Conservation International in 2003.
But in 2006, the carbon project did not exist. Project documents reveal that these carbon offsets were actually “pre-certified emission reductions” based on nothing more than a feasibility study carried out by Winrock International in 2004.
“The eyes and ears of conservation authorities”
Once the Makira REDD project started, local communities started to feel the impacts of the restrictions placed on their livelihoods.
“Men started to leave the most isolated villages, moving toward towns and logging camps in search of income once access to land tightened,” Corcoran writes. “Women, children, and the elderly remained behind.”
Corcoran writes that,
Henri Mani, a schoolteacher, conservationist, and friend, showed me how these pressures fractured communities. Some families became the eyes and ears of conservation authorities, reporting on neighbours who cut timber or farmed as they always had. Trust eroded. Quiet divisions formed. Promised benefits rarely arrived in ways that matched the scale of restriction. What was described as shared protection began to feel like uneven surveillance. The forest remained. The cost was absorbed within the community.
Since the Makira REDD project was verified by Rainforest Alliance in September 2012, the project has sold 654,903 carbon credits. The buyers include accounting firm PwC, but the buyers of most of the carbon credits are not listed on Verra’s registry.
Since July 2018, no carbon credits have been sold from the Makira REDD project. Between 2020 and 2024, the project became part of a jurisdictional REDD programme under the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility.
In November 2024, the massively destructive mining giant Rio Tinto announced that it had committed US$16 million to the Makira REDD project. The funding will cover a new baseline assessment, according to Verra’s new standards, monitoring and reporting. Rio Tinto will also buy carbon credits from the project.
The project status on Verra’s registry is currently “Late to verify”.
Carbon colonialism
In his “Carbon Elsewhere” article Corcoran critiques carbon offsetting. He calls it the “carbon compromise”. Instead of rich countries addressing over-consumption, endless growth, capitalism and extractivism, offsetting allows business as usual to continue.
Corcoran writes that,
Offsetting did not demand that fossil fuel extraction slow. It did not require airlines to fly less, supply chains to shorten, or consumption to fall. It allowed emissions to continue, provided they were accounted for elsewhere. Offsetting did not ask societies to change. It asked them to calculate.
Instead of transforming economies, addressing the climate crisis “became a matter of bookkeeping”, Corcoran writes.
And this is where the underlying logic of carbon trading is just like colonialism.
Under colonialism, forests became sources of timber. Savannahs became game parks. The land was managed from afar, for the benefit of the colonisers.
Under carbon trading, forests, grasslands, wetlands, and soils in the Global South become assets capable of absorbing greenhouse gas emissions from the Global North. The land is managed from afar, for the benefit of the carbon traders.
“The emissions remain,” Corcoran writes. “Responsibility is redistributed.”