Global Forest Coalition

By Valentina Figuera Martínez, GFC Gender Justice and Forests Campaign Coordinator

The original version of this article was published in Mongabay

As global leaders convene in Armenia this week for the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) conference of the parties (COP17), it is difficult to ignore how women’s oppression is deeply intertwined with the exploitation of ecosystems. After almost two decades of pledges, biodiversity action remains underfunded, forest loss continues to be a growing threat, socio-ecological transitions are a low priority, and ecosystems are spiraling toward collapse.

The impacts of resulting climate disasters and biodiversity destruction are not felt equally, yet gender justice issues also remain unresolved within these international talks.

In Yerevan, Armenia, countries will consider the first global review of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF), which was the first formal assessment to measure progress since its adoption in 2022. COP17 is also poised to advance efforts on biodiversity finance under the umbrella of common but differentiated responsibilities.

But progress cannot be measured only in targets, financial commitments and international mechanisms. We should also ask a more basic question: What can we learn from the people who are already protecting biodiversity in their territories?

Women leading agroecology and community conservation initiatives in Zambia. Image courtesy of Kapyanga Women Association & Zamsof.

While hundreds of policymakers spend long hours negotiating decisions to promote false solutions and powerful corporate actors lobby to continue profiting from biodiversity destruction and obstruct environmental regulations, women from the Global South continue working without big cameras or fancy social media presences to protect what is left of their territories. They are ensuring the continuation of life on Earth for you, me, and future generations.

The reality in the negotiation corridors will be very different from the violence, extortion, and environmental destruction in the mining areas surrounding El Callao, in Bolívar state, Venezuela, for example, which is one of the epicenters of the gold rush promoted after the U.S. military invasion of the country earlier this year. Being born and raised in Bolívar, it will be difficult for me to agree in Yerevan that governments are “taking action for nature.”

And after hearing over the last several months from friends and colleagues from the Global South about human rights violations and ecosystem destruction they confront, it is important to remind everyone of an incontrovertible fact: As long as governments fail to address the systemic drivers of biodiversity destruction — especially in the Global South — and continue using domestic policies to expand extractivist sectors while broadening status quo dependency, these failures will persist.

One of the most contentious topics is biodiversity finance. Biodiversity offsets and credits, debt-for-nature swaps, and nature-based solutions are just some of the flawed market-based instruments presented to mobilize finance toward Global South countries. Despite all the widely known controversies, poor performance and human rights abuses, they are increasingly dominating attention while urgent priorities — including allocation of direct resources for community-led conservation actions and giving communities full decision-making power in finance institutional structures — remain unaddressed.

Market-based schemes should be ruled out. They instrumentalize greenwashing and allow brokers, developers, intermediaries and large NGOs to extract funding that should be benefiting communities.

Indigenous women of the Ticuna community of San Francisco de Yahuma in Loreto, Peru, are breaking gender barriers and taking on leadership roles on conservation in their communities. Image courtesy of Joseph Zegarra/Rainforest Foundation US.

Women and youth making a difference

Over the last few months, I have been working with friends and colleagues from Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia to understand what real solutions to the climate and biodiversity crises look like. We all have in common a deep reverence for life, respect for traditional wisdom, a great deal of technical forest knowledge, advocacy experience, and a strong commitment to defending territories. And, of course, a tireless stubbornness to fight for systemic changes to the current model of development.

Real solutions might look like an agroecological farming system rooted in traditional knowledge, or a community defending its territory from extractivist industries. They might be women organizing to protect forests, strengthen food sovereignty, or build more equitable forms of community autonomy. I’ve also seen women from Brazil, Colombia, Chile, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Nepal plus researchers from Morocco and Zambia, a peasant from Uruguay, an Indigenous leader from Panama and legal activists from Bangladesh all showing resilience and concrete community-led conservation actions.

All of them remind us that the value of ancestral knowledge, community autonomy, and access to decision-making power cannot be replaced by money or “innovative schemes.” Their real community-led solutions cannot be separated from the political dimensions of life and stay only on the technical side, focusing on reformist approaches to delay urgent systemic changes. They cannot be “scaled up” like the top-down generic schemes presented in international talks.

Real women-led solutions are unique, as every complex ecosystem is, and demand putting power in the hands of environmental defenders. The ancestral ‘nainu’ agroforestry system in the Gunayala autonomous territory of Panama is a hopeful example capable of teaching us what biodiversity action actually looks like, as the Gunadule people create a shield of resistance with a concrete community-led solution centered on traditional knowledge and women’s leadership. The strong understanding of these Global South women about the interconnections between oppression and the exploitation of ecosystems is just as inspiring as the sophisticated strategies they have built to confront mining, agribusiness, colonial legal frameworks, and patriarchal policies.

Working with the women behind these initiatives has also shown me that documenting their solutions is only part of the task. The point is not to turn these communities into inspirational examples for an international audience, nor is it to extract their knowledge and package it into another global model. It is to recognize that these communities have their own knowledge, priorities and political agency, and that biodiversity policy needs to create the conditions for those solutions to flourish.

That means secure rights to land and territory. It also means direct, public and accessible finance. And, it means protecting communities from destructive extractive projects, recognizing traditional knowledge and women’s leadership, and giving communities meaningful power over the decisions and financial structures that affect them.

Working with this group of women and men on a Gender-Just Real Solutions Map for Territories and Communities is a learning path to find answers to a complex crisis. One thing is clear: We must support localized actions which are genuinely community-led solutions that uphold rights, autonomy, socio-ecological transitions and create conditions to fight social inequalities.

The question for COP17 is not whether these solutions exist. They do.

The question is whether governments are prepared to recognize them, resource them, and most importantly, listen to the people who are already putting them into practice.

Valentina Figuera Martínez is a feminist researcher and campaign coordinator at the Global Forest Coalition, where she works with communities and civil society organizations to advance gender justice, biodiversity protection and the rights of women and Indigenous and local communities.

At least 130 organisations urge UN carbon market Supervisory Body to suspend credits and independently investigate controversial Myanmar cookstove project

UTRECHT, 6 October, 2026 — At least 130 civil society organisations, networks and other stakeholders are calling on the Supervisory Body of the Paris Agreement Crediting Mechanism (PACM) to immediately suspend the first carbon credits issued under the UN’s new “high-integrity” Article 6.4 carbon market and commission an independent, comprehensive assessment of the project behind them.

The call comes as the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body meets in Bonn from 5–9 October for its 23rd meeting (SBM 023). At the centre of the controversy is PoA 10471, a Myanmar biomass cookstove programme backed by one of South Korea’s largest companies, which, in February 2026, became the first activity to receive credit issuance under Article 6.4. 

In an open letter signed by 130 civil society organisations, the groups call on the Supervisory Body to immediately suspend the project’s credits and undertake an independent assessment, citing serious concerns about environmental integrity, verification, human rights and other safeguards and stakeholder participation, particularly given the radically changed conditions in Myanmar following the February 2021 attempted military coup.

“The first project to receive credits under the UN’s new ‘high-integrity’ carbon market was implemented in communities experiencing war, displacement and grave human rights abuses, while independent analysis indicates that, even if the project had been implemented under ideal conditions, its claimed emissions reductions may still have been substantially overstated,” said Zaw Tuseng, foundation director of the Myanmar Policy Institute. “This is not simply a question of how many credits should be issued. It raises fundamental questions about whether carbon credits can represent genuine climate action when they are separated from the political and social realities in which projects operate.”

The concerns are wide-ranging. The June 2026 report Carbon Credits Under Fire: Myanmar, Crimes Against Humanity, and the Crisis of Credibility Facing the UN’s “High-Integrity” Carbon Markets documents serious concerns about the project’s operation amid conflict and human rights abuses, as well as safeguards, stakeholder participation and the wider conditions in which its claimed emissions reductions were generated. 

PoA 10471 was designed and registered before the February 2021 attempted military coup, but continued operating during all but one month of the monitoring period underlying the first Article 6.4 issuance, from January 2021 to May 2022. Its first six component activities covered 27 townships in Myanmar’s central Dry Zone, where communities experienced documented war crimes and crimes against humanity, including attacks on civilians, forced displacement, the burning of homes and public buildings, and conflict-related sexual and gender-based violence.

Project documentation identifies the Dry Zone Greening Department and other Myanmar government authorities in connection with implementation and data collection. The Dry Zone Greening Department operates under the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environmental Conservation, which came under military control following the takeover, and is a major income earner for the junta through gemstone mining and other resource exploitation. 

The project’s monitoring documentation does not acknowledge these fundamental changes in the political, administrative and security environment or consider how they may have affected implementation and the claimed mitigation outcomes. However, verification reports indicate that security conditions prevented the verification team from conducting the required on-site inspections of monitored households in any of the project’s implementation areas. Instead, the verification team was granted an exceptional exemption and permitted remote inspection. Instead of site visits, the verification team conducted video interviews through Zoom with just 22 end-users from an office in Yangon. Only two of the interviewees were women.

Meanwhile, two independent analyses of the project’s emissions reductions calculations have raised substantial concerns about the quantity of credits issued: an earlier analysis estimated that the project was over-credited by a factor of 14 under the CDM, while more recent analysis estimates that it is still likely to be over-credited by approximately a factor of seven under Article 6.4’s supposedly tougher rules. These findings further undermine the claim that the first credits issued under the new mechanism represent genuine and verifiable emissions reductions.

“Environmental integrity cannot be reduced to accounting methodology alone. Simply refining the methodology used to calculate emissions reductions and slapping on a “high integrity” label does not guarantee that the resulting credits represent genuine mitigation, especially when they are so completely separated from the political, social and environmental circumstances in which they are supposedly generated,” said Oli Munnion, Global Forest Coalition (GFC)’s Climate Justice and Forests Campaign Coordinator. “The Paris Agreement Crediting Mechanism has fallen at the first hurdle. The Supervisory Body must immediately suspend this credit issuance and investigate how on earth it was approved in the first place.”

The organisations also raise concerns about safeguards and participation. Women and girls are presented as important beneficiaries of the cookstove programme, yet women in the project areas have experienced displacement, severe restrictions on movement and conflict-related sexual and gender-based violence. Of the 231 households surveyed for monitoring purposes, 80% of recorded heads of household were men, raising questions about whether women—whose unpaid labour the project depends on—were adequately represented as decision-makers rather than primarily as beneficiaries.

The organisations are calling on the Supervisory Body to immediately suspend any further issuance, transfer or use of credits associated with PoA 10471 and to commission an independent, comprehensive assessment of the project and the process through which the credits were approved. The assessment should examine the project’s environmental integrity, monitoring and verification, safeguards and stakeholder participation, as well as the impact of Myanmar’s radically changed political, administrative and security circumstances. 

The organisations are also calling for the assessment to consider the best available evidence and real-world conditions, rather than treating formal methodological compliance or previous validation and verification as conclusive, and for its findings to be made public. Where the evidence shows that applicable requirements were not met or that the credits do not represent genuine and verifiable emissions reductions, the Supervisory Body should take appropriate corrective action, including revoking credits already issued and preventing the project from participating further in the mechanism.

In support of these calls, a Formal Stakeholder Communication was also submitted to the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body in response to its call for stakeholder input on matters before SBM 023. The submission sets out the concerns in detail and calls for PoA 10471 to be considered under the relevant agenda items, including Agenda item 4.3 on issuance.

PoA 10471 is the first activity to receive issuance under the Article 6.4 mechanism and therefore represents an early test of what the mechanism’s stated commitment to “high integrity” means in practice.

“Climate mitigation cannot be based on human rights abuses and questionable carbon accounting. If the Article 6.4 mechanism is to have credibility, its first project must be assessed against the realities in which the claimed emissions reductions were generated, not simply against calculations on paper,” said Sooyoun Han, Plan 1.5’s Policy Activist.