The LEAF Coalition’s REDD deal in Pará faces a lawsuit and opposition from Indigenous and Quilombola communities
The state of Pará is carrying out a consultation process six months after signing the deal.
On 24 September 2024, the state of Pará in Brazil signed a US$180 million jurisdictional REDD deal with the LEAF coalition to sell 12 million carbon credits from the state’s forests. The buyers of the carbon credits included Amazon, Bayer, BCG, Capgemini, H&M Group, Walmart Foundation and the governments of Norway, the UK, and the US.
The LEAF Coalition was launched in April 2021 by the governments of Norway, the UK, and the US. The Coalition is coordinated by a company called Emergent, that was set up by Environmental Defense Fund in 2019. The carbon credits are to be certified under the ART TREES standard.
In Guyana, Indigenous communities accused ART TREES of certifying a massive REDD deal with oil and gas giant Hess Corporation despite the fact that the Indigenous communities whose forests were generating the carbon credits did not give their consent.
The REDD deal with Pará would have been, at the time, the world’s largest carbon credit sale.
The Governor of Pará, Helder Barbalho, claims to have consulted Indigenous Peoples. The Federation of Indigenous Peoples in Pará supported the deal.
Alessandra Korap Munduruku is the coordinator of the Pariri Indigenous Association, which represents 15,000 Munduruku Indigenous People in southwest Pará.
In an interview with journalist Carolin Weische, shortly after the deal was announced, she said that,
“When politicians talk about the environment in general terms, I am suspicious. Because they don't say they are against the Marco Temporal1, and we see how the Marco Temporal is being adopted. The governor supports the railway line, which threatens the territories of Indigenous Peoples and traditional communities. He talks about the environment and carbon credits, but he supports projects that attack our rights and destroy our sacred rivers and forests. Helder Barbalho has never consulted us, the Indigenous Peoples.
On 8 October 2024, 38 Indigenous and community organisations signed an open letter to Barbalho criticising the failure to carry out a process of free, prior and informed consent.
The legal case
The jurisdictional REDD deal is now being legally challenged in the Brazilian Federal Court and could face being completely shut down.
Mongabay reports that on 3 June 2025, Brazil’s federal prosecutor’s Office filed a lawsuit seeking to cancel the agreement and demanding US$36 million in moral damages for Indigenous Peoples and local communities.
Mongabay’s Carla Ruas writes that,
The lawsuit came after prosecutors raised a series of issues regarding the program and an attempted conciliation between the parties, to no avail. A federal judge has since shut down the request for an injunction, but the case is ongoing.
The lawsuit alleges that the Pará government engaged in the advance sale of carbon credits — a violation of Brazil’s new legislation for the carbon market. The law enacted in 2024 established a set of rules to prevent the double-counting of credits when multiple projects are located in the same area.
Felipe de Moura Palha e Silva, head of the Public Prosecutors’ Office in Pará, told Mongabay that the contract constitutes an advance sale. The number of carbon credits, the fixed price, and a schedule for delivery of carbon credits are all included in the contract. “These credits don’t even exist yet,” he told Mongabay. “They can only be traded after they are issued and verified.”
The state of Pará argues that it is only a promise of a sale. The state’s environment department told Mongabay that, “the sale will only be completed if the credits are duly issued after official validation”. In March 2025, the government removed all mention of advanced payment from the contract.
No free, prior and informed consent
The lawsuit also raises the issue of the failure to conduct a proper process of free, prior and informed consent before signing the jurisdictional REDD deal with the LEAF coalition.
This failure to carry out a process of free, prior and informed consent is in breach of ILO Convention 169, which Brazil ratified in 2002.
After the REDD deal was signed, the government started a consultation process, which began with a series of informational meetings, followed by 47 consultations.
On the same day that Mongabay’s article was published, Carol Burga, Emergent’s director of Indigenous Peoples local communities and stakeholder engagement wrote an article on the website Nature4Climate. Burga makes no mention of the lawsuit against the Pará jurisdictional REDD deal.
She writes that the consultation process in Pará has “the full participation of traditional peoples”.
That simply is not true.
The state of Pará covers a vast area — almost the size of Germany and France combined. More than 1,000 Indigenous, Quilombola2, and extractive communities live in Pará.
Mongabay reports Raul Romão, Pará’s environmental secretary, as saying that one-on-one consultations would be impossible and if they were to be carried out, they could take as long as 10 years.
Indigenous communities excluded
The reality is that Indigenous and Quilombola communities are being excluded from the consultation process.
Mongabay’s Carla Ruas spoke to Miriam Tembé, an Indigenous leader from the I’ixing community in Tomé-Açu, northeastern Pará. She told Mongabay that,
“At no point did we meet with the government to discuss carbon credits. No one ever contacted us. . . .
“Our territory is our home. We’ve always lived in harmony with nature, and we’ve never needed to receive money to protect it. . . .
“We are constantly fighting to protect our territory. And now the government wants to rent it out to industries around the world so they can keep polluting and destroying the planet.”
Ruas also spoke to Vanuza Cardoso, a Quilombola leader from the Abacatal community near Belém, the state capital. Her community took part in informational meetings about the REDD deal. She told Mongabay that,
“By the end, most people didn’t understand the project. Even those of us familiar with carbon credits don’t feel informed enough to support this deal. . . .
“We, traditional communities, have an emotional connection to this land. Our Afro-religious communities need roots and leaves from these forests. We need to interact with nature. Prohibiting access to these spaces would be a violent act. . . .
“They’re saying the money from this deal will be transformed into public services like schools and territorial protections. But those are our rights, and it’s the state’s duty to guarantee them. We shouldn’t give up our rights under the pretense of an agreement.”
The Marco Temporal restricts Indigenous land rights to territories that were physically and permanently occupied on 5 October 1988, the date of Brazil’s constitution. The Supreme Federal Court of Brazil has declared the Marco Temporal to be unconstitutional. The UN Special Rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous Peoples has made four statements opposing the Marco Temporal since 2021.
Quilombola communities are descendants of formerly enslaved people. Nearly 4 million African slaves were imported to Brazil. The country was the last country in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery, in 1888.