Washington Post’s investigation into “carbon cowboys” in the Brazilian Amazon focusses on Michael Greene’s REDD projects

The investigation found that more than half of all REDD projects in the Amazon overlapped with public land.

A recent article in the Washington Post looks at REDD projects in the Amazon rainforest. The Amazon rainforest has attracted increasing numbers of companies and individuals in search of carbon credits.

The Washington Post writes that in the Amazon these people are called “carbon cowboys”:

[A] six-month Washington Post investigation shows that many of the private ventures have repeatedly and, authorities say, illegally laid claim to publicly protected lands, generating enormous profits from territory they have no legal right to and then failing to share the revenue with those who protected or lived on the land. The use of such lands to sell credits also contributes little to reducing carbon emissions.

The Washington Post found that more than half of all REDD projects in the Brazilian Amazon overlapped with public territories. The public land claimed by these private ventures covers a total area of more than 20.2 million hectares.

Companies buying carbon credits from these REDD projects include Netflix, Air France, Delta Air Lines, Salesforce, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Airbnb, Takeda Pharmaceutical Co., Boston Consulting Group, Spotify, and Boeing.

The Washington Post compared the boundaries of 101 REDD projects certified by Verra and Cercarbono with government maps of publicly protected areas in the Amazon. (Four projects were excluded from the analysis because their map files malfunctioned.)

Most of the projects have not yet been certified. Of the 35 that have been certified, 29 overlap with public lands. These projects have generated more than 80 million carbon credits. At least 30 million of these have been sold. The Washington Post estimates the value of these credits at more than US$212 million.

Brazil has no laws regulating trade in carbon credits. Only two projects have received government authorisation, according to the Washington Post.

Brazilian authorities are starting investigations. In June 2024, federal police launched Operation Greenwashing. Five arrest warrants were issued. The police alleged that nearly two dozen companies had conspired to sell more than US$34 million illegal carbon credits.

Michael Greene’s REDD projects

The Washington Post writes that,

One of the biggest actors in the Amazon’s carbon credit rush is American businessman Michael Greene, a brash Midwesterner given to bold proclamations. “I’m the biggest carbon credit [preservation] project developer in Latin America,” he boasted in a 2022 letter to officials in one Amazon city. “I’m so big that my business is 50 percent of Brazil’s carbon credit market.”

On LinkedIn, Greene’s company Agfor claims that, “Agfor is the largest REDD project developer in the World if based on credit issuance.” The company “plans to issue over 100 million credits by 2025 total”.

In a detailed report about Greene’s REDD projects, Brazilian publication Sumaúma notes that Greene’s LinkedIn profile states that since January 2024 he’s been back in the US, after “16 years in the rough and tumble Amazon”.

PHOTO Credit: Sumaúma.

The Washington Post’s journalists, Terrence McCoy, Júlia Ledur, and Marina Dias, identified 19 projects overseen by Greene and his companies. All overlapped with public lands either partially or completely. Ten are already certified with 45 million carbon credits generated.

Several of the projects are close to the town of Portel. The Washington Post reports that corporate records show that Greene and his companies have overseen four projects that overlap with public lands. Much of the land had been set aside for river communities.

The Washington Post estimates that credits sold from these projects had a value of US$87 million.

Brazilian authorities told the Washington Post that the river communities did not receive any of the money. “They robbed us,” Maria de Nazaré Oliveira Sousa told the Washington Post. She lives on land given to her community by the state of Pará.

State authorities have taken out lawsuits alleging wrongful use of public land.

World Rainforest Movement’s 2022 report

In late 2022, World Rainforest Movement published a report about four REDD projects in Portel.

A Pará state official called Andréia Barreto read the report. She read up on carbon credits, got together a team of investigators, and travelled to Portel.

Barreto told the Washington Post that Verra had approved three REDD projects despite the fact that the projects overlapped with public lands. A large part of the public lands had been set aside in 2012 for local river communities.

Barreto tracked down 34 land deeds that appear to show that the land is private. The Washington Post reports that,

What she discovered, she recounted, confirmed her suspicions. Almost none of the deeds were valid. The preservation programs, she said, were built on a lie.

PHOTO Credit: Washington Post.

Jonas Morioka’s land deals in Portel

In 1990, a physician in São Paulo called Jonas Morioka started buying large areas of land in Portel. Morioka was born in Japan, and moved to Brazil in the 1980s.

Barreto found that Morioko did not receive the official authorisations he needed, meaning that the land purchases were invalid.

Nevertheless, Morioka made several deals in the early 2010s, leasing land to REDD project developers, according to contracts reviewed by the Washington Post.

Morioko did not respond to the Post’s questions or interview requests and on his website, Morioka denies all wrongdoing:

I am being targeted for defamation simply because I own a large area of ​​land. But in reality, I do not own as much land as people claim on the internet - they are stating fanciful figures that are not true.

Barreto has filed four lawsuits alleging theft of public land. The lawsuits name Morioka and others.

The Washington Post reports that, “Other state agencies, including the state Institute of Lands of Pará, corroborated her finding in annexed filings.”

Michael Greene is involved in all of the projects that Barreto reviewed.

Greene moved to Brazil in 2010. The following year, he appeared on a Dutch TV consumer programme, Keuringsdienst van Waarde. Greene told the Dutch journalists that,

We basically sell land for reforestation or for carbon trading projects. . . .

We’re a real estate consultant, basically. We tell people how to buy, we know absolutely everything about the laws and the Amazon.

One of Greene’s partners was Morioka.

Greene: “If I stop, Portel is basically finished”

The Washington Post writes that Greene created a story that Portel is “‘a backwater mafia-lead [sic] city’ where illegal loggers, corrupt politicians, and labour unions were destroying the forest and imprisoning thousands of poor river dwellers in a system of ‘oppression’.”

According to his story, Greene was one of the few people resisting the destruction of the forest. “If I stop,” Greene told The Intercept in 2022, “Portel is basically finished.”

Greene has appeared several times on REDD-Monitor.

In August 2020, Greene wrote to me asking me “not to add” his name to REDD-Monitor. In the email, Greene explained his work in Portel as follows:

I still have my one REDD project, but I have been using it to raise money to do social projects to free modern day slaves in the Amazon. The people were given a choice by the illegal loggers: Work for them for below minimum wage, be evicted or be killed.

The slaves are landless people who have been deprived of their right to gain title. So the REDD project raises money and we help everyone gain titles, through a complicated government process. Our goal is 2300 households of these incredibly abused people. We have already completed 800 households.

I greatly appreciate it, but my focus is not as much on REDD now, but helping people who are really in a very bad situation. I need to get these people title in there [sic] names to protect them.

The Washington Post writes that according to project documents submitted to Verra, the REDD projects sent river scouts to monitor the forest and to report illegal loggers to the authorities. This was intended to help river communities to resist loggers that were trying to take over their land.

The Washington Post journalists, McCoy, Ledur, and Dias, carried out a review of public records and academic research. They visited the project areas. And interviewed 40 people familiar with the region or projects, including 16 of Greene’s current and former employees.

Based on this research, McCoy, Ledur, and Dias report that,

The threat of widespread destruction and rampant violent crime was largely exaggerated, according to crime and deforestation data. None of those queried — including police officials, politicians, environmental authorities, community leaders and former employees — could confirm that projects ever conducted regular surveillance.

Sergio Gibson is an employee credited in project reports as having coordinated the monitoring. “There was never any patrolling,” he told the Washington Post.

Former employees spoke to the Post on condition of anonymity “out of fear of being associated with the projects or reprisals by Greene”. They told the Post that Green fictionalised Portel’s security situation. He inflated the project’s social impacts, and dismissed concerns about irregularities.

Verra suspends the Portel projects

In September 2023, Verra finally got around to suspending the Portel projects, to investigate unspecified “stakeholder comments”.

Verra’s Senior Director Media and Advocacy, Joel Finkelstein told the Washington Post that determining land ownership in the Amazon can be difficult. He said that Verra has urged its auditors to identify overlap with public lands. Verra has also suspended several projects, including three in Portel.

Finkelstein said,

“This is the most important forest on the planet that we have to find a way to save. We are committed to getting it right.”

Cercarbono passed the buck to its auditors. In a statement to the Post Cercarbono wrote that, “Cercarbono does not provide verification services nor is it within our scope.”

Thales West is an Assistant Professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is Brazilian and previously worked as an auditor for Rainforest Alliance.

West told the Washington Post that auditors are hired by project developers and often travel from abroad to assess Amazon projects.

West told the Post that,

“The auditors are from Germany or somewhere else, and they don’t speak any Portuguese, and they fly all the way to the Amazon to do an audit. You can see why some certified projects have a lot of problems. . . . How many thousands of examples of fraud do we have in land deeds in the Amazon?”

Greene as victim?

Greene denies any wrongdoing in filings submitted to Pará state court.

He also claims that the projects were not profitable and that they have benefitted local communities. Greene cancelled an interview with the Washington Post and did not reply to detailed questions from the Post’s journalists.

Greene claims that disgruntled former employees had given an inaccurate version of events. In an email to the Washington Post, Greene wrote,

You are giving Credance [sic] and a platform to groups that want to discredit me and steal my business. Everything you have been fed so far is false.

In July 2023, Michael Greene gave an interview to Quantum Commodity Intelligence. Greene claims to be the victim. He told QCI that,

“After the project became a success, that’s when the illegal loggers and their associations would come out and they would literally go in front of our boat and warn the houses: Don’t accept, they’re coming, don’t accept, they’re just here to steal your land.”

Greene added that,

“You’re disrupting the region, they don’t like it. You’re changing the status quo, they don’t like it. They want the population to be poor, they want them to be uneducated.”

But villagers in the project areas told the Washington Post that they had received nothing except a small cookstove. None of the villagers that the Post spoke to said they used the cookstoves.

Other villagers said that they had been tricked into signing contracts that prevented them from carrying out traditional livelihoods, including sustainable logging.

Marivaldo Pereira de Oliveira told the Washington Post that,

“People thought they were becoming owners and were left with nothing, not even the right to do what they’d done before.”

Indigenous Carbon LLC

In 2022, a company called Indigenous Carbon filed 18 project description documents with the registry Cercarbono. The projects covered a total of almost 5.7 million hectares. The projects involve the territories of several Indigenous Peoples: the Parintintin in Amazonas state; the Cinta Larga in Rondônia and Mato Grosso; and the Munduruku and Kayapó in Pará.

Indigenous Carbon LLC was incorporated on 18 July 2022 in the tax haven of Delaware. The Washington Post reports that the owner of Indigenous Carbon is Michael Greene.

According to Sumaúma, Greene’s link to Indigenous Carbon only became public when Cercarbono released the certification reports.

PHOTO Credit: Sumaúma.

The Washington Post writes that according federal government attorneys the projects are “invalid”:

In the absence of government approval, companies like Greene’s have no right to carbon credits associated with Indigenous territories, and the residents themselves have no legal right to sell them or give them away, according to Brazil’s Federal Public Ministry. Such deals could open traditional communities to predation, federal attorneys said in a March meeting, and were void without government authorization.

“These contracts are illegal,” Daniel Luis Dalberto, a federal attorney helping lead the public ministry’s inquiry. “They are excluding public agencies, which can’t be left on the outside of this.”

Indigenous Carbon told Cercarbono that the REDD projects were the villagers’ idea and Greene’s company was only a consultant. But six former employees told the Washington Post that Indigenous Carbon had been far more than a consultant. The company entered Indigenous territories and paid leaders to take part in unauthorised carbon credits deals.

In a series of WhatsApp messages seen by the Post told employees to cover up the company’s role.

“Have the leaders tell their people that they sought a company and contracted it to consult them on how to do the project,” Greene wrote to one employee in June 2022. “Not that they were approached.”

In December 2022, Greene wrote in another message, “They need to say, ‘We did the project, without the help of a white man coming to our land.’”

An Indian company called 4K Earth Science Private Limited audited all of Indigenous Carbon’s projects. By late 2023, six of Indigenous Carbon’s projects had been certified by Cercarbono. The six projects were allocated a total of 24 million carbon credits.

In late 2023, Cinta Larga leaders sent two letters to federal attorneys pleading for help. The letters warned that Indigenous Carbon had sidelined Funai, Brazil’s National Indigenous Foundation.

One of the letters, signed by 10 Indigenous leaders, states, “Consider this document an extremely grave denunciation of something that harms our rights.”

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