Remembering the Surui Forest Carbon Project, which was the first indigenous-led REDD project, plus:

A conversation with Geoffry Mwangi Wambungu, Chief Research Scientist at the Kasigau REDD Project in Kenya.

He explains what social scientists mean by “theory of change,” and tells us why he believes the term “co-benefits” is a misnomer in natural climate solutions.

Further reading on the Surui Carbon Project here: https://www.ecosystemmarketplace.com/articles/story-surui-forest-carbon-project/

Full Transcript (non-scripted portions translated by AI)

 

CO-BENEFITS VS CORE BENEFITS, WITH GEOFFREY MWANGI

Bionic Planet, Season 9, Episode 95

OPENING HOOK

STEVE ZWICK

Almir Surui was ten years old when the first logging truck came to his tiny village deep in the Amazon Forest.

It came to chop a single stand of centuries-old mahoganies, and it came with the grudging approval of the chiefs.

After all, they reasoned, it was just one truck, one stand, one time, and for a good cause.

The chiefs weren’t the grizzled old men you probably imagine. Most were barely into their 30s, because more than 90 percent of everyone had died in the five years before Almir was born in 1974.

Ninety Percent.

Gone.

They lost their mothers, their brothers, their sisters, and their lovers.

They lost almost everyone who knew anything about governance.

The surviving chiefs, shamans, and elders lost faith in their own abilities to serve their people, because their time-tested traditions had failed.

Prior to 1969, Brazilian authorities categorized Almir’s people as an “UNCONTACTED” tribe of the Amazon, but in reality, they HAD contact — SOMETIMES peaceful but MOSTLY violent contact — with neighboring tribes, rubber tappers, and even Brazilian explorers going back decades.

One of those neighboring tribes called Almir’s people the “Surui,” but Almir’s people called themselves the Paiter.

In the regional Tupi dialect, Surui means “enemy,” while Paiter means “real people.”

Due to a miscommunication, the Paiter were entered into the lexicon of indigenous people as “Surui” in the leadup to First Contact, which took place on October 7 1969.

Today, their name is hyphenated: Paiter-Surui.

The Paiter-Surui had lived in harmony with the forest for centuries, but they didn’t live in harmony with those who invaded their territory.

And invasions increased dramatically in the years prior to First Contact, as Brazilian authorities encouraged westward migration into the forest.

It was a bloody period, and the Paiter-Surui held their own in combat, but they couldn’t hold their own against European diseases — such as smallpox, measles, and the flu.

That’s what got them in the end.

The elders died, and kids became chiefs. One of those kids was a 17-year-old named Itabira, who learned to navigate the OUTside world of Brazilian society as the world IN-which he’d grown up disintegrated

(Aside)

By the way, if you can’t find any of this online, it’s because it’s all original reporting, and my book hasn’t been published yet.

Anyway, Itabira realized early on that to save his people, he had to push the Paiter-Surui and their struggle into Brazilian awareness. To do that, he and other chiefs stopped fighting illegal loggers and started colluding with them to finance trips to Brasilia, the capital of Brazil.

Soon, they were chopping trees to feed their families and pay for medicine, and by the mid-1990s, they were known as the “logging Indians” — despised by environmentalists who saw them as traitors to the cause and riven internally by fights over how to manage their resources.

The Paiter-Surui broadly split into three factions:

one that embraced the destruction of the forest for commercial gain,

one that opposed that destruction,

and one — the largest of them all — that WANTED to save the forest but NEEDED to feed their families.

Almir was born in 1974 — five years after First Contact — and by the time I met him in the late aughts, he was leading the tribe’s anti-logging faction.

To save the forest INside his territory, he had to first persuade the OUTside world — meaning most of us — that his people — and ALL indigenous people — needed help, not condemnation, if they were to end deforestation.

That’s because far less than half of tropical deforestation comes from corporate clear-cutting and most comes from poor people acting out of desperation, not greed — as we’ve seen in this series focused on Kenya.

Illegal logging is something of a hybrid, because commercial entities are buying that illegally-harvested timber, and corrupt officials often turn a blind eye to it.

Plus, standing up to loggers is dangerous.

I can’t count the number of indigenous people who have been killed doing so, and loggers even put a price on Almir’s head shortly after I met him.

Almir put his life on the line to save his forest, and he eventually slashed deforestation by developing the first indigenous-led REDD project.

REDD, with two Ds, stands for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation, and it usually works by helping forest people develop sustainable ways of making a living — such as beekeeping, agroforestry, and non-timber forest products.

The overwhelming majority of community members voted in favor of Almir’s REDD strategy, but it wasn’t universal. The logging faction opposed it, and the loggers ironically found powerful allies among the wackier elements of the environmental and social justice movements.

The Indigenist Missionary Council, or CIMI, for example, threw their support behind the illegal loggers who had put a $100,000 bounty on Almir’s head.

They launched a flagrant disinformation campaign that characterized the logging ban as a ban on traditional hunting and gathering, and they portrayed the head of the logging faction as the voice of the people despite the fact that his faction lost the vote.

The whole thing was bizarre to anyone who knew the truth, and that, fortunately, included most indigenous leaders across the region. The denounced CIMI, and I’ll link to my coverage of that in the show notes, but most media swallowed CIMI’s lies hook, line, and sinker.

Despite these efforts to sabotage it, the project succeeded in slowing deforestation — at least for a few years.

Then, some time around 2015, gold and diamonds were discovered in the territory, sparking a tsunamic of illegal invasions that tipped the balance in favor of CIMI and the loggers.

Deforestation surged, and the project is currently suspended as a result.

Opponents gleefully celebrated this tragedy and used it to validate their own ideological biases.

And what are those beliefs?

Here’s what CIMI says:

“The environment, and the cultures living in harmony with it, should be the basis for human development and societies; not an item of the market economy.”

Greenpeace also opposes REDD, and here is their justification:

“One must question the motive for this ongoing reliance on market-based mechanisms, the very system that has led humanity to what is now a point of systems collapse.”

Now, we all agree that climate change is a result of the greatest market failure in human history — one that values a dead forest more than a living one — and I created Bionic Planet to unpack ALL the efforts to correct that failure — not just to go on and on about REDD all the time.

I keep coming back to REDD because the torrent of disinformation spewing onto the pages of certain newspapers is making it impossible to have a rational public discussion on the subject, and forests are dying as a result.

There is an incredibly rigorous and DECADES-LONG DEBATE over how best to fix this mess, and my goal with Bionic Planet is to mainstream that legitimate debate, so you can see what’s true, what’s false, and where reasonable people can disagree.

Everyone should be free to express their views, but no one is allowed to support their beliefs with opinions disguised as findings, or with half-truths, innuendo, and facts that are cherry-picked, decontextualized, and distorted — which is what CIMI, Greenpeace, and a lot of those opposed to market mechanisms and the whole ESG movement do — as I pointed out in Episode 77.

I mention all this because I ran into Almir at year-end climate talks in Dubai, and he’s still fighting for his people’s forest and still arguing — rightly — that we ALL need to support people on the front line of the climate challenge. Finance is how we do that.

I’ll link to stuff I’ve written about the Paiter-Surui in the show notes, but for now, the main thing to keep in mind as you listen to today’s show is that all these efforts involve real people in real communities facing real challenges that need our help.

That gets lost in a lot of the abstract discussions and technical terms we throw around — such as, for example, our tendency to differentiate between CLIMATE benefits and CO-benefits.

Climate benefits are the reductions or removals of greenhouse gasses, while co-benefits are the social, economic, and biodiversity impacts.

In the Surui project, the co-benefits are things like…

support for sustainable livelihoods in an indigenous community,

the promotion of gender equality through support for women-run enterprises, and

the restoration of habitat for rare and endangered species, among other things.

But the term “co-benefits” is a misnomer, because these activities make the emission reduction possible — whether you’re