Guyana’s carbon‑market push

Guyana is trying to turn one of the oldest climate bargains into cash: keep 18 million hectares of forest standing, sell the carbon value, and spend the money at home instead of waiting for aid. Its Low Carbon Development Strategy says that model has already brought in the world’s first jurisdictional forest credits under the Architecture for REDD+ Transactions standard and a record forest-credit sale worth at least US$750 million. (lcds.gov.gy) The buyer is Hess Corporation, which agreed to purchase 37.5 million credits from Guyana between 2022 and 2032 for a minimum of US$750 million. Guyana says that deal covers about 30 percent of its internationally recognised credits, which leaves room for more sales if the market holds up. (guyanachronicle.com) This is not a tree-planting project on a few acres. Guyana says about 90 percent of the country is still forested, so the product it is selling is the avoided loss of a huge intact forest that already stores carbon and shields biodiversity across the Amazon Basin. (guyanachronicle.com) The government’s pitch is simple: oil money can rise fast, but forest money can last if the forest stays alive. The 2022 Low Carbon Development Strategy was built after a seven-month national consultation and framed forests, clean energy, and climate protection as one development plan instead of three separate policies. (lcds.gov.gy) By September 2024, Guyana said it had already received US$237.5 million from carbon-credit sales and was investing all of it in community, regional, and national priorities under that strategy. The same update says a guaranteed 15 percent is self-managed by Indigenous communities that choose to opt into the programme. (lcds.gov.gy) That village share has become the political center of the whole experiment. In 2024, President Irfaan Ali said Guyana had earned US$87.5 million that year, and the government raised the village allocation from the standard 15 percent to 26.5 percent so communities would receive US$23.2 million instead of a smaller payout. (guyanachronicle.com) By February 2026, the government said the village share had been 15 percent in 2023, 26.5 percent in 2024, and 21 percent in 2025, while keeping the promise that villages would not get less than their guaranteed floor. Officials tied that money to named projects like the Banabo Guest House in Region One, the Kamana Mini Mart, and a women’s group in Region Seven employing 29 women. (guyanachronicle.com) Guyana is also trying to make those credits easier to sell. In February and March 2024, the country announced that its credits had become the first in the world eligible for the first phase of the Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation, the United Nations-backed airline emissions programme known as CORSIA. (lcds.gov.gy) The next piece is paperwork, not publicity. A United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change review in Georgetown from September 30 to October 4, 2024 said Guyana had refined the climate indicators that will feed into its next nationally determined contribution, which is the national climate plan countries file under the Paris Agreement. (unfccc.int) That is why Commonwealth officials are holding up Guyana as a green-finance case study. The country is trying to prove that a developing economy can turn standing forests into a repeat revenue stream, route part of that money straight to Indigenous villages, and use the rest to fund resilience and energy transition without waiting for richer countries to write bigger checks. (lcds.gov.gy)