Indigenous Filipinos hope carbon credits can protect their forests

January 31, 2025 - 3:07 PM
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Narlito Silnay, Traditional Palaw'an leader, during signing ceremony of agreement to develop a carbon financing project in their ancestral domain. Palawan, Philippines. Nov. 25, 2024. (Conservation International/Handout via Thomson Reuters Foundation)
  • Indigenous communities aim to reduce deforestation
  • Leaders sign a carbon credit deal protect forests
  • Illegal logging and mining are main threats

— The lands of some 12,000 Indigenous Filipinos are under threat from forest loss and environmental degradation near the southern tip of Palawan, known as the Philippines’ last ecological frontier for its cluster of islands rich in biodiversity.

But some Indigenous leaders in the western archipelagic province now want to change that by getting investors to pay to reduce deforestation and degradation by purchasing carbon credits.

Two ancestral domains within Palawan’s 97,000-acre Mount Mantalingahan Protected Landscape signed an agreement with Conservation International and the government’s National Commission on Indigenous Peoples last month to co-develop a carbon financing project within their area and help reduce deforestation.

Panglima Norlito Silnay, a leader of the Pala’wan Indigenous group, hopes the long-term conservation effort can be managed by members of the community, without interference from business or individuals seeking to take advantage of the resources.

“Some investors only wanted to use and destroy our forests, not to improve the lives of Indigenous peoples,” Silnay told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a video call.

The Pala’wan Indigenous peoples rely directly on nature for food and income, but Silnay said they were threatened by illegal mining and logging, palm oil plantations that destroy agriculture, land grabs and climate risks.

Despite its protected status, the Mount Mantalingahan landscape has lost more than 20% of its upland and mangrove forests due to illegal forest clearing in the last two decades, Conservation International said.

Indigenous Filipinos are the primary protectors of forests, but the global boom for energy transition minerals has intensified pressure on Indigenous lands, according to the 2024 State of Indigenous Peoples Address Report of local conservation group Legal Rights and Natural Resources Center.

Indigenous ownership

The Philippines protects the rights of Indigenous people over natural resources within their territory, but many Indigenous Filipinos struggle to win ancestral domain titles that recognize their ownership of the land.

According to the new deal, the two ancestral domains in Palawan will create a project together to quantify and verify the amount of planet-heating carbon captured and stored by the conservation efforts.

Wilson Barbon, Philippines director of Conservation International, said the project – the country’s first-ever carbon project owned by Indigenous peoples – would act as a catalyst for other programs elsewhere.

He said the agreement recognized Palawan’s Indigenous groups as rightful benefactors of the carbon their forests capture.

“We will only help them develop their carbon assets by building their capacity to run their own carbon project in the long term,” Barbon said.

Carbon credits

Carbon trading in the Philippines, however, still has a long way to go and the government has yet to formalize a system to issue credits to businesses that emit carbon dioxide.

Voluntary carbon markets are a source of much debate globally due to issues with verifying what projects reduce greenhouse gas emissions and by how much. Some activists also argue that credits give polluters an excuse to keep polluting.

“We recognize that there are concerns,” said Barbon. “Our position is that instead of shutting down the entire system, we strive to improve it.”

He hopes the new Indigenous enterprise can set the standard for carbon credits projects with strong biodiversity and community engagement.

The project, he said “presents the government an example of a community-led initiative. It’s difficult, but it can be done, and can also force our government to set the framework to do more of this in the future”.

However, it took Silnay’s community eight years to reach an agreement for a carbon trading project.

For the next 25 years, the community will have to keep their forest intact, through awareness building on forest protection efforts, carbon inventory, proper land zoning and alternatives to destructive slash-and-burn farming.

Carbon credits generated by the project will not produce revenues for the communities until next year, but will be directly invested in conservation.

Until then, Conservation International will pay community members the minimum wage to participate in conservation efforts.

The government’s ancestral domain management office will determine an annual budget outlining how the carbon credits can be spent, and Indigenous representatives will manage the funds generated from the carbon project.

Romel Ligo, a pastor and Palawan Indigenous community leader, said the project could help resolve the division among Indigenous leaders on how to better protect their resources.

He said some had been enticed by private businesses offering short-term jobs in exchange for resources.

“We wanted to protect nature because this is where we get our sustenance, from food, to livelihood and medicine,” Ligo said. “It is important for us to pass it on to the next generations.”

($1 = 58.6890 Philippine pesos)

— Reporting by Mariejo Ramos; Editing by Jack Graham and Jon Hemming