The carbon credits women can’t cash: When forest protection means food insecurity

Mama Thérèse used to grow cassava on the forest edge in Mai-Ndombe province. The plot wasn’t large, maybe half a hectare, accessed through customary rights that her husband’s family held for generations. She planted in the rainy season. Harvested enough to feed six people and sell a little surplus at the village market. The land wasn’t registered anywhere officially. It just was theirs.

That changed in 2016 when the carbon project arrived. The project is massive now, covering nearly 300,000 hectares. It’s registered under the Verified Carbon Standard as a REDD+ initiative. That’s Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation. The basic promise: protect the forest, generate carbon credits, sell those credits to companies offsetting their emissions, and share the revenue with local communities.

On paper, Mama Thérèse should be benefiting. The project documents talk about supporting 50,000 local residents. There’s language about empowering women and smallholder farmers. The project received $19.47 million in June 2025 from the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility for reducing 3.89 million tons of carbon emissions. That’s real money moving through the system.

She’s seen almost none of it.

What she has seen is restricted access to the land where she used to farm. The forest is now protected. That’s the point. Trees store carbon. Carbon generates credits. Credits generate money. The logic is clean. The implementation is messier.

Mama Thérèse didn’t attend the village assembly meetings when the project launched. Women in her community don’t typically speak in those forums. Her husband attended. He gave consent on behalf of the household. That’s standard practice. It’s also where the first gap opened.

The DRC’s national framework, finalized in February 2025, mandates that 25 percent of REDD+ revenues flow to locals. That sounds substantial. The question is which locals, how it flows, and who controls the decisions about allocation.

A study published in Social Politics in March 2025 analyzed 675 carbon projects globally. It found that women contribute up to 70 percent of forest conservation activities like planting and protecting seedlings. They’re also routinely excluded from decision-making processes about how projects operate and how benefits get distributed.

In Mai-Ndombe, the benefit-sharing plan exists. It’s detailed, running over 100 pages. It outlines how carbon payments will be distributed among local communities, Indigenous peoples, customary authorities, and local partners. There’s particular attention, on paper, to forest-dependent and vulnerable groups.

The plan doesn’t account for something simpler. It doesn’t account for what happens when the woman who used to grow cassava on a half-hectare plot no longer has that land to grow on.

Mama Thérèse tried adjusting. She shifted to a smaller area outside the protected zone. The soil is poorer there. It floods more easily. Her yields dropped by more than half. She buys more food now than she grows. That costs money she doesn’t have at the same rate she used to earn it.

The carbon credit payments that were supposed to compensate for this loss? They come through the village chief and a project management committee. The committee has seventeen members. Three are women. Payments have been sporadic. When they come, they’re distributed according to a formula that prioritizes households with formal land documentation.

Mama Thérèse’s family doesn’t have that documentation. Their rights were customary, meaning recognized by the community through tradition and use. 

Not recognized on paper. So when payments flow, they flow to others first.

This isn’t unique to Mai-Ndombe. Across the DRC, 71 forest carbon projects have been allocated land, covering around 103 million hectares. That’s an area larger than Egypt. Some projects work well. The Mai-Ndombe project has achieved real conservation outcomes. Deforestation rates have dropped to near zero in the project zone. Bonobo populations have rebounded. Forest elephants are returning.

The question is what happens to the women who used to farm where the elephants now roam.

A 2025 study from the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility noted that women in many developing countries face structural barriers to accessing carbon finance benefits. Land and natural resources are often titled in men’s names. Membership in community forest groups is linked to formal land ownership. If you don’t own land officially, you can’t join the group. If you’re not in the group, you’re not at the table when decisions get made.

When you’re not at the table, you don’t shape how resources get allocated. You don’t influence which community projects get funded first. You don’t decide whether carbon revenues go toward building a school or improving a road or setting up a women’s agricultural cooperative.

Mama Thérèse would have voted for the cooperative. She didn’t get the chance.

There’s another layer to this. Carbon credits are a global commodity now. The market is projected to hit $100 billion annually by 2030. Africa is expected to supply 20 percent of those credits. Right now, Africa captures just 5 percent of the proceeds, according to the Africa Carbon Markets Initiative’s 2024 outlook.

That means most of the value generated from African forests flows out. Brokers, consultants, certification bodies, project developers, all of them take their cut before money reaches the communities doing the actual work of forest protection.

A Corporate Accountability report released in June 2025 found that buyers retired 47.7 million problematic offsets in 2024 alone. Studies revealed that most REDD+ schemes had overstated their climate impacts by up to 400 percent. The carbon market is in crisis. Trust is broken. Buyers like Microsoft have paused purchases pending reforms.

For women like Mama Thérèse, the market’s integrity crisis is secondary. Her immediate problem is feeding her family with less land and irregular payments.

The DRC government is trying to address some of these issues. A carbon registry is being operationalized. A carbon tax on industrial activities is set to begin in 2026. The aim is to capture more value domestically and weed out low-quality projects.

These are policy fixes. They don’t address the gendered realities on the ground.

In October 2024, the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office released practical guidance for carbon project developers. It’s titled “Integrating gender into the design, implementation, and monitoring of carbon credit projects.” The guide is thorough. It outlines steps, activities, and resources to promote gender equity at every project stage.

One key recommendation: project participation contracts should include women, even in households where land is titled to men. Another: benefit-sharing mechanisms need to account for women’s unpaid labor in forest conservation. Another: decision-making structures must create safe spaces for women to voice concerns, particularly around sensitive issues like resource access and safety.

These are good recommendations. Implementation is the gap.

Mama Thérèse hasn’t seen the guidance. She wouldn’t have time to read it anyway. Her days are longer now. She walks farther to farm on less productive land. She spends more time managing household food scarcity. Her daughter dropped out of school last year to help with the workload.

That’s not measured in any carbon accounting. The project tracks tons of CO2 avoided. It doesn’t track the extra hours women work when their farming land disappears. It doesn’t track the school years, girls lose. It doesn’t track the nutrition gap that opens when families shift from subsistence farming to buying food they can’t always afford.

There are carbon projects getting this right. Smaller scale, usually. Community-led. With gender equity built in from the start, not added as an afterthought. The Khasi Hills Community REDD+ project in India uses a multi-pronged approach to ensure women are involved in monitoring and decision-making. The Matavén REDD+ project in Colombia supports over 15,900 Indigenous people and specifically fosters gender equality by strengthening Indigenous women’s roles in conservation decisions.

These projects are exceptions. They prove it’s possible. They also show how rare it is.

Back in Mai-Ndombe, the project continues. Carbon credits are being generated and sold. Money is flowing, somewhere. Conservation is happening. The forest is protected. From a climate perspective, the project works.

From Mama Thérèse’s perspective, she lost her cassava plot, gained restricted forest access, receives sporadic payments she can’t predict or control, and feeds her family less reliably than she did before the carbon market discovered her forest.

The carbon credit system isn’t designed to see her. It’s designed to see trees and tons of CO2. Those are measurable. Her food security isn’t in the accounting framework. Neither is her decision-making power nor her daughter’s education.

Carbon markets are being pitched as a solution to both climate change and poverty. For that to be true, the markets need to value the people protecting the forests as much as they value the carbon those forests store.

Right now, they don’t. And women like Mama Thérèse are paying the price while others profit from the credits generated on land they can no longer farm.

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