Carbon Elsewhere
"How climate responsibility is being displaced."
ETHNOMAD
Article and Photographs by Dr Tom Corcoran.
2,500 Words
Published by ETHNOMAD
Fading Cultures Magazine
1st of January 2026
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I first encountered carbon offsetting deep inside the forest in northeastern Madagascar in 2008. It was not introduced as a market mechanism or a climate innovation. It arrived as a conservation initiative. The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) led the project to protect the Makira forest, one of the most significant remaining blocks of rainforest in the country. The language was careful. The intentions, I believe, were genuine. This was the early era of REDD and REDD+, when carbon finance was still regarded as a means to save forests while improving the lives of the people who lived within them.
Makira was presented as a model. Vast, biologically rich, globally significant, and under pressure from logging, farming, and poverty. The idea, at least in outline, was simple. Keep the forest standing. Measure the carbon stored in its trees and soil. Sell the avoided loss as a credit in international markets. Use the revenue to fund conservation and support local livelihoods. What was far less clear was how any of this translated into everyday life.
In village meetings, REDD+ was explained through interpreters, diagrams, and lengthy discussions that moved between Malagasy, French, and the technical language of conservation. Carbon was described as invisible yet valuable, held in trees and soil, and as something the world was now willing to pay for. The local people were told that this carbon had always been valuable, but now it had a price.
When questions came, they were practical rather than ideological. Would people still be allowed to farm? To hunt? To gather timber? To move through the land their families had used for generations? How would benefits be shared? When would they arrive? Who would decide? The answers were often provisional. This was new. Details would come later. Trust was requested in advance of clarity.
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.
At the time, it was presented as progress. Makira was, in many ways, a test ground. Remote, difficult to reach, and far from sustained scrutiny. As restrictions began to be enforced, subtle changes took hold. Men started to leave the most isolated villages, moving toward towns and logging camps in search of income once access to land tightened. Women, children, and the elderly remained behind. It was a pattern I recognised immediately, the same one I had seen in droughts, agricultural collapses, and humanitarian crises, where livelihoods quietly fail before aid ever arrives.
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.
Henry Mani, a schoolteacher and deeply knowledgeable local conservationist, is carrying a wooden box he made for a World Bank visit to Ambodivoangy village in Madagascar’s Makira Forest. He had begun a small community garden to improve nutrition and create a modest income, hoping the visitors might support it in some small way. Yet, no funding followed; the efforts of the locals were treated as a curiosity, not a commitment.
The Carbon Compromise
Carbon offsetting did not begin as a form of deception. It started as a compromise. By the late twentieth century, climate science had made the problem clear. Greenhouse gas emissions were rising. The consequences were global. Governments accepted the diagnosis long before they accepted the cure. Cutting emissions at source meant restructuring economies built on fossil fuels. It meant confronting consumption, growth, and the political costs of real change.
Offsetting offered a way to defer that confrontation. Under international climate frameworks, mechanisms were developed that allowed emissions generated in one place to be offset by reductions or sequestration elsewhere. The logic was presented as elegant and scientific. Carbon circulates globally. It does not matter where reductions occur, only that they occur.
This logic was formalised under the Kyoto Protocol and later reinforced by the Paris Agreement. Markets emerged. Credits were issued. A new vocabulary took hold. Net zero. Climate neutrality. Avoided emissions. What was rarely examined was why offsetting was so immediately attractive.
The answer lies in what it did not require. 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.
This was the decisive shift. Climate responsibility became a matter of bookkeeping rather than transformation. Carbon, once a byproduct of industrial systems, became a tradable unit. Forests, grasslands, and wetlands were reimagined as assets capable of absorbing emissions generated far beyond their boundaries. Land that had long been lived in, farmed, grazed, and governed through local systems was reframed as part of a global mitigation infrastructure.
This is where the system begins to resemble something older. Historically, colonial systems often operated by redefining land to serve external needs. Forests became timber reserves. Savannahs became game parks. Rivers became transport corridors. Local authority was overridden by distant governance, justified through claims of progress, stewardship, or necessity.
Carbon offsetting echoes this structure, though in subtler form. External climate priorities increasingly shape land-use decisions. Carbon value is calculated in distant offices. Contracts are written in legal and technical language that is inaccessible to most of the communities affected by them. Time horizons stretch decades into the future, binding land to agreements negotiated by people who will never live there.
The moral language has changed, but the underlying logic has not. Carbon offsetting allows high-emitting societies to preserve existing freedoms by shifting the burden of adjustment elsewhere. The emissions remain. Responsibility is redistributed.
This is not incidental. It is a function of how the system is designed.
Carbon produced here is neutralised on paper somewhere else. The smoke remains. The burden moves.
Let’s consider who benefits and who pays
The beneficiaries of offsetting are relatively straightforward. Corporations use credits to claim climate responsibility while maintaining core business models. Governments meet international commitments without confronting domestic resistance. Financial actors profit from certification, verification, and trade. A global offset economy has emerged, even as absolute emissions struggle to fall.
The costs are less visible, absorbed in places far from the markets where credits are traded. Communities living in forests designated as carbon sinks often face new restrictions on land use. Pastoralists grazing land mapped as mitigation assets are told that movement must be limited. Farmers are encouraged or compelled to change livelihoods, not because their practices are illegal, but because they complicate future accounting.
In theory, these communities are meant to benefit. Carbon finance is framed as development funding, a pathway to schools, clinics, and alternative livelihoods. Participation is described as voluntary. Consent is said to be informed. In practice, the power imbalance is significant.
Carbon contracts are complex and long-term. Benefits are frequently delayed, conditional, or absorbed by administrative layers. Restrictions arrive quickly. Land use becomes conditional. Traditional practices are reframed as risks. The forest or rangeland is now performing a global service, and local people are expected to adapt accordingly.
What makes this particularly difficult to contest is the moral framing. These are not mining concessions or oil leases. They are climate solutions. To question them can be portrayed as anti-environmental or indifferent to planetary survival. This pressure falls most heavily on those least responsible for the climate crisis.
A farmer in Madagascar, a pastoralist in East Africa, or a forest community in Southeast Asia did not create the emissions being offset. Yet their land, labour, and future are among the most adjustable variables in the system. They are asked to sacrifice use, access, and autonomy so that emissions elsewhere can continue with ethical cover. Carbon offsetting does not simply redistribute emissions. It redistributes responsibility.
It also rests on a fragile equivalence. Carbon stored in landscapes is treated as interchangeable with carbon left unburned underground. This obscures critical differences. Forests can burn. They can degrade slowly. Credits are often sold years in advance of the protection they assume. If a forest is later lost, the emissions it was meant to offset have already occurred. Fossil carbon, once burned, is effectively permanent on human timescales. The atmosphere does not recognise offset contracts.
These weaknesses are well documented within climate science and policy debates. They persist not because they are unknown, but because offsetting aligns with powerful economic and political incentives. The result is a system that delays structural change while imposing long-term constraints on vulnerable communities. Climate action appears ambitious, but its costs remain unevenly distributed. Those with power retain flexibility. Those without absorb limits.
This is where the argument of a new colonial dynamic becomes difficult to avoid. Carbon offsetting is not colonial in intent. But it can be colonial in effect. It redefines land for external priorities. It relocates decision-making away from those who live with the consequences. It legitimises unequal exchange as a matter of moral necessity. The extraction is no longer timber or minerals. It is atmospheric capacity.
A group of Massai question their role in this global carbon business, while they are asked to pay with their land, livelihoods, heritage and traditional knowledge of a lanscape they have occupied for generation after generation.
It also allows fortress conservation to be reborn.
Conservation has a long memory. Long before carbon markets existed, conservation was often entangled with displacement. Colonial administrations across Africa and Asia established protected areas by removing people, sometimes forcibly, to preserve landscapes imagined as pristine. National parks, game reserves, and wildlife corridors were created through exclusion. Human presence was framed as a threat. Nature was something to be saved from those who lived within it.
This model became known as fortress conservation. It never disappeared. It adapted. Today, it is resurfacing under different justifications. Climate mitigation. Carbon storage. Global environmental necessity. Nowhere is this clearer than in East Africa.
For centuries, Maasai communities have lived across what are now parts of Kenya and Tanzania, managing rangelands through seasonal grazing, mobility, and deep ecological knowledge. Their livelihoods depend on movement. Their land use sustains grasslands that support wildlife, biodiversity, and soil carbon. Yet they have repeatedly been portrayed as obstacles to conservation.
In Tanzania, this logic has intensified around the Ngorongoro Conservation Area. Established in 1959, Ngorongoro was initially conceived as a multiple-use landscape in which pastoralism and wildlife conservation could coexist. Over time, that balance narrowed.
In recent years, large numbers of people have faced eviction or sustained pressure to relocate under narratives of environmental protection. Official justifications emphasise sustainability and biodiversity. Less openly discussed is the growing attention to carbon value. Grasslands such as those in Ngorongoro store significant soil carbon. Restricting grazing and movement increases predictability for accounting. Mobile pastoral systems, however ecologically effective, do not fit easily into offset frameworks that favour static landscapes.
For the Maasai, this does not represent a break with history, but its continuation under a new framework, one that asks people with deep ecological knowledge to leave in order to become poor, visible, and dependent elsewhere.
Similar dynamics appear elsewhere. In Kenya, rangeland carbon projects now cover extensive areas. In Southeast Asia, forest-based carbon initiatives have reshaped land access across Cambodia, Indonesia, and Laos. In Cambodia alone, conservation-linked displacement has affected large numbers of Indigenous people over recent decades. Across these cases, the pattern repeats. Conservation areas expand. Human use contracts. Carbon value rises. Decision making consolidates elsewhere. What links these outcomes is not malice, but measurement.
Carbon offsetting demands certainty. Human systems are adaptive by design. Offset markets tend to favour landscapes with fewer people because people introduce variability. Fortress conservation returns because it simplifies accounting.
Girls carrying firewood in Nduta Refugee Camp, Tanzania. Daily survival tasks like this are increasingly enrolled in carbon credit programmes, linking refugee life to emissions accounting far beyond the camp.
The Carbon Turn in Humanitarianism
The logic of carbon offsetting has not remained confined to conservation and development. It has begun to reshape the humanitarian field itself. Agencies created to protect displaced people are increasingly engaging with climate finance and carbon market mechanisms. The reasons are not difficult to trace. Climate change is accelerating displacement. Refugee-hosting countries are under sustained pressure. Traditional humanitarian funding is shrinking, short-term, and politically fragile. Climate finance, by contrast, is expanding, strategically prioritised, and framed as a solution capable of addressing the environment, livelihoods, and protection at once.
In this context, refugee settlements and the landscapes around them are being reimagined. They are no longer seen only as sites of emergency or survival, but as places where emissions can be reduced, forests restored, and carbon credits generated. Clean cooking programmes, reforestation initiatives, and ecosystem restoration efforts are increasingly linked to voluntary carbon markets, with pilot schemes underway in large displacement settings in East Africa. The shift is presented as pragmatic and forward-looking. Yet it carries deeper implications.
Humanitarian agencies were established to protect people, not to manage carbon assets. Their legitimacy rests on protection mandates and humanitarian principles, not on environmental regulation or market governance. Carbon markets, however, depend on long-term control, behavioural consistency, monitoring, verification, and enforcement. These requirements inevitably shape priorities on the ground.
When humanitarian institutions enter carbon markets, market logic follows. Refugees and host communities risk being reframed not primarily as rights holders, but as participants in mitigation systems. Activities such as fuel use, cooking practices, land access, and environmental management take on a new significance. They are no longer only matters of health, dignity, or survival. They become variables in carbon accounting.
None of this is to deny the value of clean cooking or environmental restoration in displacement settings. When designed around protection rather than compensation, such programmes can reduce indoor air pollution, improve health outcomes, ease pressure on surrounding ecosystems, and restore a measure of dignity to daily life. These gains are real and urgently needed. The danger lies not in the interventions themselves, but in the burden they are asked to carry. When humanitarian programmes become tied to carbon markets, they risk being repurposed from harm reduction into substitution, standing in for emissions reductions that high-emitting economies remain unwilling to make.
Consent in such contexts is complex. Participation may be described as voluntary, but choice is constrained by displacement itself. Environmental compliance can quietly become a condition of assistance. Restrictions introduced in the name of sustainability are absorbed unevenly, particularly where alternatives are limited or culturally inappropriate.
Climate finance, in this setting, becomes conditional in subtle ways. What can be measured, verified, and credited begins to matter more than what can be protected. This is not an argument about intent. It is an argument about incentives. As climate finance grows and humanitarian budgets tighten, agencies face pressure to align with mechanisms that unlock new resources. In doing so, they risk normalising systems that shift responsibility rather than confront its source. Institutions designed to respond to displacement may find themselves operating within market structures that depend on the continuation of high-emission economies elsewhere.
This is where a quiet transformation takes place. Humanitarian space becomes entangled with the offset economy. Protection and compensation begin to blur. And responsibility, once again, is displaced.
A sifaka lemur in Madagascar’s eastern forests. Biodiversity like this is why conservation matters, and why carbon finance was first promoted as a way to protect forests under pressure.
But what happened to REDD+ in Madagascar?
REDD did not collapse in scandal. It thinned out. In places like Madagascar, where some of the earliest REDD+ initiatives were tested, the problems emerged quietly and procedurally rather than dramatically. Measurement proved subjective. Baselines for avoided deforestation depended heavily on assumptions about future land use in landscapes shaped by poverty, migration, political instability, and shifting cultivation. Small changes in modelling produced large differences in claimed carbon savings, revealing how fragile certainty was in practice.
Permanence also proved fragile. Forests burned, degraded, and were affected by cyclones and periods of weak enforcement. Carbon credits were often issued years in advance of the protection they were intended to support, and that protection could not be guaranteed. When forest loss later occurred, the emissions had already been offset elsewhere. The atmosphere did not wait for audits.
Leakage displaced deforestation rather than preventing it. Where restrictions on REDD+ sites tightened, pressure frequently shifted beyond project boundaries. Forest loss changed location rather than disappearing. Local success could be reported while regional deforestation continued.
Governance faltered. REDD+ assumed clear land tenure and stable institutions in contexts where customary land systems dominated, and legal recognition was weak. Consultation processes took place, but consent often remained procedural. Promised benefits were delayed, uneven, or absorbed by the administration. As restrictions became tangible and benefits elusive, trust eroded.
By the late 2010s, REDD+ was no longer promoted as a flagship climate solution. It was reframed as readiness, capacity building, and a partial contribution. Its core logic did not disappear. It migrated. Under new labels such as nature-based solutions and voluntary carbon markets, many of the same assumptions returned. The same landscapes were mapped. The same communities were consulted. The same promises were made, often with less scrutiny than before. This is not innovation. It is institutional forgetting.
So what now?
At climate negotiations leading into COP30, carbon markets again dominate the discussion. Offset integration, flexibility, and scale are framed as pragmatic responses to urgency. So too is the presence of fossil fuel interests. This is not a contradiction, it is design. Offsetting allows climate rhetoric to coexist with continued extraction. It converts responsibility into a transaction.
Real climate responsibility looks different. It begins with reduction, not compensation. It requires confronting fossil fuels, aviation, industrial agriculture, and consumption patterns that have long been treated as non-negotiable. Offsetting delays that reckoning. By relying on carbon markets, high-emitting societies avoid changing what matters most. Instead, forests, grasslands, and peatlands are asked to compensate for what remains politically untouchable.
Are the climate talks becoming another Makira?
What began in Makira as a technical solution slowly revealed itself as something else. A system that asked forests to stand in for political courage. A system that converted living landscapes into compensatory space for emissions generated elsewhere. A system that shifted the constraint onto people with the least power to refuse it.
I have seen the same logic surface in very different places. In forests where access quietly narrows. In rangelands, where mobility becomes a problem to be solved, and in communities asked to leave land they understand intimately, not for their own survival, but to satisfy distant calculations. The atmosphere may be shared, but clearly the responsibility is not.
When climate action depends on asking others to absorb limits we will not accept ourselves, something has already gone wrong. Conservation becomes control. Accounting replaces accountability, and displacement is reframed as a necessity.
Makira was not the beginning of carbon offsetting. It was an early place where its consequences became visible, before the language hardened and the markets grew confident. What unfolded there was not a failure of conservation, but a rehearsal. A system that learned how to move limits away from those with power and place them onto landscapes and people deemed absorbent. If we are willing to look closely, Makira still shows us what happens when climate responsibility is translated into distance, when accountability becomes calculation, and when protection is asked to do the work of change. The forest stands, the ledger balances, and elsewhere, the cost is quietly borne.
Women displaced by conservation and carbon offset projects in Tanzania. Their loss underwrites the promise of climate neutrality elsewhere.