Carbon projects without Indigenous land recognition are bound to fail. Here's why.

Forests are often portrayed as the world’s lungs, the ecosystems that keep our planet alive and our climate stable. Today, more and more financiers claim they can save forests by turning them into carbon assets. The World Bank has been one of the biggest promoters of this idea, backing carbon programs from Latin America to Southeast Asia.

Yet on the ground, projects built on contested land, lacking Indigenous recognition, or excluding Indigenous governance systems are consistently failing. These failures are not mere implementation glitches; they are baked into a financing model that rewards measurable carbon outputs over justice, rights, and real ecological resilience. What makes this failure more troubling is that it is often engineered by international financial institutions (IFIs) themselves, not accidental implementation lapses.

The question that arises is why the World Bank continues to back climate and land-use programs implemented by actors with long-standing records of violating Indigenous rights and undermining safeguard commitments. When the Bank has received repeated concerns that project implementers have ignored Indigenous communities' right to free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC), excluded Indigenous communities from meaningful consultation, and caused disproportionate harm to Indigenous women, why are these same actors able to continuously benefit from the land that the community has been taking care of for years? And when accountability mechanisms generate evidence of social and environmental harm, why does that information not meaningfully shape project design, risk assessment, or implementation strategies going forward? In this article, we examine these questions through the case of Long Isun in East Kalimantan, where a major World Bank–financed carbon program proceeded despite unresolved land conflicts, lack of legal recognition, and clear warnings of harm to Indigenous livelihoods and governance systems.

Carbon without tenure: Why REDD+ frameworks put communities like Long Isun at risk 

A fundamental problem with the World Bank’s REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation Plus) approach stems from the way REDD+ is designed to operate. REDD+ aims to reduce emissions by preventing deforestation, but it relies on governments being able to clearly define, measure, and control land use across vast forested areas. Meanwhile, the projects are routinely launched in places where land tenure is insecure, Indigenous rights are unresolved, and governance systems are contested – conditions that REDD+ research consistently identifies as high-risk for failure. A comparative study of 19 REDD+ project sites and 71 villages in Brazil, Cameroon, Tanzania, Indonesia, and Vietnam found that Indonesia was “the most problematic country” in the sample, with 85% of study villages reporting perceived tenure insecurity, 90% reporting external use of their forests, and 35% unable to effectively exclude outsiders.

The failures we see in the World Bank–financed REDD+ projects are not isolated accidents or the result of a few poorly designed interventions; they reflect a global pattern of institutional behavior. As Accountability Counsel’s outcomes report puts it, “The gaps are not incidental; they are systemic. Delays, cancellations, poor monitoring, inequitable distribution of remedy, and a profound lack of attention to power imbalances… are recurring themes.” The Long Isun community's complaint to the World Bank reflects this pattern in stark terms. Despite years of documented land conflict, an unresolved land rights recognition process, and clear evidence that REDD+ design would restrict forest access, undermine livelihoods, and expose Indigenous women to disproportionate harm, the Bank proceeded with the project, prioritizing carbon accounting over rights, consent, and tenure reform. When Long Isun objected, they did not encounter a system equipped to remediate harm; instead, they faced bureaucratic deflection, fragmented responses, and a financing architecture that continued to monetize their forests even after consent had been withdrawn. This is not a breakdown in an otherwise functional system, it is the system functioning as designed to advance technical and financial performance while externalizing risk, harm, and unpaid labor onto Indigenous communities.

Global evidence shows Indigenous-led and gender-responsive forest governance works

For decades, global research and publicly available reports have shown that effective forest preservation is most successful when founded on secure land rights, Indigenous governance, and gender-responsive stewardship, rather than imposed from above. Forests managed by Indigenous peoples and local communities generally experience lower deforestation rates and better conservation outcomes than neighboring state-managed or concession forests, and  legal recognition of community land rights is a key driver of this success.

Long Isun did not oppose climate action in principle; the community’s concerns emerged from its direct experience with a World Bank-financed carbon project implemented on their customary lands. Their opposition grew from lived experience. For more than a hundred years, families in Long Isun have practiced swidden farming through carefully timed rotational burning. Each plot is cultivated, rested, and returned to forest in cycles known by memory rather than maps – cycles taught by elders, adjusted by seasons, and carried forward through stories, rituals, and daily work. Women know which seeds must be saved after each harvest, which plants restore the soil, and when the land is ready to burn or to rest. This system has fed generations, sustained biodiversity, and shaped Long Isun’s Indigenous identity.

That continuity was disrupted when a World Bank-financed carbon project entered the territory. Land traditionally managed through rotational swidden farming could no longer be cultivated when these practices were classified as “illegal.” In Long Isun, decisions are traditionally made through communal deliberation in the longhouse, guided by elders and grounded in collective consent. The project instead drew the community into externally designed consultations that framed participation as agreement, using technical procedures and documents in a language many community members could not read. Women’s knowledge of medicinal plants, seed selection, and land stewardship was recast as “backward” or “non-compliant” and incompatible with carbon conservation goals. At the same time, the community began to understand how benefits would flow: not primarily to those who had protected the forest for generations, but to state agencies and formally recognized companies, while Long Isun would receive only a small fraction of the value generated from their land. Absorbed into the project without recognition or consent, Long Isun now bears the risks: restricted access to forests, exclusion from meaningful benefits, intensified land conflicts, and the gradual erosion of cultural practices. 

These harms fall disproportionately on women, whose daily livelihoods and knowledge systems are most directly tied to the land. Their resistance is not obstructionist; it reflects their role as the region’s most consistent forest stewards, maintaining agroecological systems and governance norms that sustained East Kalimantan’s forests long before carbon markets, climate finance, or any climate projects ever existed.

The harms described above did not remain abstract for the community. As restrictions on land and forest use intensified, decision making became increasingly opaque and women’s livelihoods and knowledge systems were pushed to the margins. The community sought a way to be heard. In this context, Long Isun submitted a complaint to the World Bank Inspection Panel, not as a rejection of climate action, but as an effort to trigger dialogue and accountability. The complaint addresses what the community identifies as the project’s core governance failures, including the lack of recognition of Indigenous peoples (Masyarakat Hukum Adat), unresolved land conflicts, and the exclusion of women and customary institutions from meaningful decision making. 

The Panel has since decided not to proceed with a full investigation, concluding that the issues raised, particularly MHA recognition and land boundary disputes, were “pre-existing” and therefore lacked a plausible causal link to the project. This reasoning is difficult to reconcile with the realities of jurisdictional REDD+ implementation. Where projects rely on provincial control over forest governance in areas with unresolved tenure and contested Indigenous status, such conditions are not external to project risk – they are central to it. Even without a formal investigation, the complaint makes visible the collective demands articulated by the community: meaningful participation, recognition of Indigenous stewardship authority, protection of land rights, and the ability to sustain customary livelihoods. These demands are neither radical nor obstructive. In challenging a project that treats communities as data points rather than rights-holders, Long Isun is defending a system of forest stewardship that has long sustained livelihoods, social cohesion, and biodiversity well before the arrival of carbon markets or externally driven climate finance initiatives.

What needs to change in carbon finance: Why Indigenous recognition and tenure security must come first

The World Bank is not a passive bystander to harm; it is an active architect of the conditions that enable it. By financing  climate projects without requiring land tenure resolution, Indigenous recognition, or meaningful consent as prerequisites, and by structuring funding around quantifiable performance indicators that governments and private actors are better positioned to deliver, the Bank institutionalizes exclusion and conflict into project design. This is not simply an oversight, it reflects a financing model that privileges rapid implementation. As a result, projects that claim to benefit communities often channel money, authority, and decision-making power toward state agencies and concessionaires who can “perform” carbon results on paper.

In places like Long Isun, the risks that investors often describe as “tenure uncertainty” are not abstract policy gaps; they are lived conflicts over forests that communities have protected for generations but that remain formally unrecognized as Masyarakat Hukum Adat (MHA) territory. When carbon projects move forward without resolving this recognition, they do not simply encounter technical delays; they reopen old disputes, weaken trust, and place communities in the position of having to defend their own land yet again. The experience of Long Isun shows that land recognition is not an optional safeguard to be addressed later in the project cycle. It is the foundation that determines whether a project can exist legitimately at all. 

The Long Isun community describes a pattern in their complaint that shows how consent was never truly sought, only manufactured. Consent was not freely obtained but constructed through procedural formalities that presented participation as agreement, and later reinforced through pressure when objections were raised. When project staff first came to socialize the carbon program, people expected a conversation. What followed instead were changes on the ground that no one had agreed to. Banners began to appear along the paths and fields announcing that burning was prohibited, even though controlled burning is central to how families grow rice and maintain soil fertility. The forest, once familiar and freely used, started to feel like a restricted space governed by outsiders. Yet these shifts continued even after the community expressed their refusal. The World Bank’s safeguards do not simply fail to prevent this harm, they make it likely by creating a system where success is measured in emissions reductions, not in whether Indigenous communities’ rights as forest guardians are truly respected. While governments and private actors respond logically to those incentives, concentrating authority and dismissing community concerns as barriers to performance rather than evidence of flawed design. 

Indigenous communities' right to free, prior, and informed consent is meant to ensure that communities have the information, time, and freedom to decide whether a project that affects their land and lives should go forward. The World Bank’s own safeguards state that Indigenous Peoples must not be coerced, manipulated, or forced to participate, and that projects lacking meaningful consent must not proceed. Yet in Long Isun, the project not only moved forward without consent – it treated refusal as irrelevant. Consent became a technicality to document, not a decision to respect, their land is still used as a benefit calculation even after revoking consent. In this system, harm is not an accident; it is the predictable result of a governance architecture that converts unresolved land, unrecognized peoples, and unremediated harm into climate finance assets and then calls the resulting dispossession a development success.

Climate finance without rights isn't progress – it's dispossession with a green logo

Long Isun’s struggle is not an outlier, nor is it a clash between “development” and “tradition.” It is a mirror held up to a global climate finance model that values carbon numbers over human rights and treats Indigenous communities as inputs rather than rights-holders. 

Long Isun’s resistance is therefore not a rejection of climate action. It is a demand that climate action stop reproducing the extractive relations it claims to undo. If the World Bank and other financiers want climate solutions that work, they must stop treating forests as commodities, communities as risk variables, and women as invisible labor, and instead make Indigenous rights, tenure security, and gender justice the foundation. Only when those conditions are in place can climate finance support the communities who have kept forests standing. Disregarding Indigenous rights erodes the socio-ecological institutions that enable sustainable forest management, thereby undermining the long-term viability of carbon interventions.