The Wall Street Journal

“Middlemen Snag Carbon-Credit Cash Aimed at Peruvian Amazon”

Made in assignment for The Wall Street Journal

2022

My latest work for The Wall Street Journal explores Peru’s carbon-credit market, an industry promoted as a solution to fight Amazon deforestation and climate change. The idea is simple: make standing trees more valuable than cleared land by channeling private capital to communities that protect the forest. But the reality tells a different story.

Take the case of Leonardo Racua. More than a decade ago, he agreed to preserve the rainforest in exchange for income from carbon credits. It wasn’t until 2022 that he received his first payment—about $8,000, part of nearly $4 million distributed among 400 residents by Bosques Amazónicos, the project’s developer. With that money, he bought pigs and a solar panel that gave him electricity for the first time, allowing him to keep a light on at night to protect his animals from jaguars. Yet this was just a fraction of the revenues generated, most of which was absorbed by a complex and opaque network of traders, registries, governments, raters, and investors.

Today, the global carbon-credit market is worth more than $2 billion, but only a small portion reaches the Indigenous and rural communities who actually safeguard the forest against illegal loggers, miners, and drug traffickers. Despite recent promises of greater participation, many Indigenous leaders warn that the system risks becoming yet another way to profit from their ancestral lands.

Through my photographs, I wanted to highlight this contradiction: the distance between the billions circulating in international markets and the daily reality of those who protect the Amazon while receiving very little in return.

Thanks to reporter Ryan Dube for his in-depth investigation and to photo editor Kate Bubacz for her invaluable support and trust.

To access the full edit please send a request to info@alessandrocinque.com

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