Guyana’s Carbon Billions

THE 592 GUARDIAN|INVESTIGATIVE EDITORIAL
Guyana’s Carbon Billions: The High-Integrity Myth and the Accountability Vacuum
The World Bank’s flagship carbon pricing report barely registers the Caribbean. Guyana’s absence from its pages is not an oversight — it is a mirror. Behind the government’s boasts of US$750 million in landmark climate finance lies an unresolved indigenous rights complaint, an opaque revenue architecture, and a deal that has now passed into the hands of Chevron without a word of parliamentary scrutiny.

The 592 Guardian Editorial Board • June 2026

The World Bank published its State and Trends of Carbon Pricing 2026 report this month — a 75-page survey of every significant carbon tax, emissions trading system, and carbon crediting mechanism on the planet. It tracks 87 implemented carbon pricing instruments across 47 countries. It documents US$107 billion in annual government revenues. It maps CORSIA-eligible credit premiums to the dollar.                                                     

Guyana does not appear once.
This is a remarkable omission. Guyana has sold a total of 37.5 million ART TREES credits for the period 2016–2030 for a combined US$750 million, with initial sales based on a floor price of US$15 for pre-2021 credits and US$20 for 2021 credits and beyond. The buyer was Hess Corporation — one of the same oil companies extracting offshore Guyanese petroleum — and the deal was announced by President Irfaan Ali in December 2022 as the centerpiece of Guyana’s Low Carbon Development Strategy.

By July 2025, Chevron Corporation completed its acquisition of Hess, adding a 30% position in the Guyana Stabroek Block to its portfolio. What was a carbon credit agreement with an independent oil company is now a contractual obligation held by one of the world’s largest fossil fuel corporations. Whether the terms, pricing, and delivery commitments survived that acquisition intact — and on whose authority that determination was made — has never been publicly accounted for before the Guyanese parliament or people.

THE SCALE PROBLEM
The World Bank report notes that the estimated total traded value of voluntary carbon credits globally in 2024 was approximately US$535 million. Guyana’s deal alone, at US$750 million committed across a multi-year window, is a figure that dwarfs entire annual voluntary market valuations. And yet the report — which explicitly discusses ART TREES as a CORSIA-approved mechanism and nature-based jurisdictional REDD+ as a growing asset class — never once names Guyana.

In February 2024, ART issued 7.14 million 2021 TREES Credits to Guyana, and Guyana became the first government to report a corresponding adjustment to the UNFCCC for the associated emission reductions. This built on Guyana being the first country in the world to be issued TREES Credits by ART in December 2022 — 33.47 million verified credits for its work to protect forests from 2016 to 2020. Most recently, the Government of Guyana announced ART’s issuance of 9,085,923 high-integrity TREES carbon credits for the year 2023, labelled as CORSIA-Eligible.

 THE CORSIA PREMIUM — AND WHAT IT CONCEALS

The World Bank report identifies CORSIA-eligible credits as the premium tier of the global carbon credit market, trading at US$15–22 per ton against a broader market range of US$1–14. The government’s announcements lean heavily into this premium status, claiming that the CORSIA label confirms Guyana’s credits meet “the highest international standards for environmental integrity , transparency, and accountability.”

This language performs a sleight of hand that demands scrutiny.

CORSIA eligibility is determined by ICAO’s assessment of the ART TREES standard as a program — not by independent verification that each individual issuance has satisfied the social safeguards the standard requires. The Cancún Safeguards — which ART TREES explicitly incorporates and which require that program participants respect, protect and fulfil the rights of indigenous peoples — are a foundational element of that social integrity framework.

The Amerindian Peoples Association has formally and repeatedly alleged that those safeguards were not met in Guyana’s case. ART dismissed the complaint on procedural grounds without examining the substance. The CORSIA label was applied regardless.

“Program-level approval does not validate instance-level compliance with safeguards. Buyers are purchasing a premium product whose social integrity certification coexists with an unresolved, substantiated allegation that the program own indigenous rights requirements were violated.”

What the government presents to the nation as independent international validation of “the highest standards” is, in reality, program-level approval that coexists with an unresolved, substantiated allegation that the program’s own indigenous rights requirements were violated at the point of implementation. Buyers — including any airline purchasing Guyana’s credits for CORSIA compliance — have not been told that a national indigenous peoples’ organization formally alleged a gross violation of the standard’s safeguards, and that the allegation was never adjudicated on its merits.

THE INTEGRITY PROBLEM
The government has marketed its carbon program under the banner of high-integrity certification and extensive national consultation. Its own communications state that all 242 villages and communities throughout the country held community meetings where every village and community voted to participate in the REDD+ program and created Village Sustainability Plans.

This account is directly contested by the people it purports to describe.

Mario Hastings, Toshao of Kako Village and Chair of the Upper Mazaruni District Council — who presented before the IACHR — stated plainly that while the government publicly claims it held consultations with Indigenous communities, those meetings were not consultations.

“Indigenous peoples were deprived of free, prior and informed consent. The distinction is not semantic.” 

Community meetings at which government officials present a fait accompli and record attendance as “participation” are not FPIC processes. FPIC requires that consent be sought before decisions are made — not after credits have already been issued and sold.

The APA specifically raised that instead of being involved in crafting benefit-sharing mechanisms from the outset, Indigenous communities received village planning documents only after the initial sale of carbon credits — an approach that limits their input and involvement in shaping how these projects can work for their long-term needs.

The government’s response to the APA’s complaint was not engagement. It was attack. The APA formally accused Vice-President Bharrat Jagdeo of conducting a “campaign of disinformation” concerning the association’s criticism of the carbon credits program.

Jagdeo characterized the APA as having been invited to participate in and help lead consultations — a version of events the APA flatly rejected. The pattern is familiar to observers of this administration: when institutional criticism cannot be answered on the merits, the critic is delegitimized.

At Climate Week 2024 in New York, the APA raised a further structural contradiction: the sale of carbon credits generated by Guyana’s forests to an oil company sits in direct tension with Guyana’s Low Carbon Development Strategy — particularly as that same oil company, now Chevron, simultaneously extracts petroleum from Guyanese waters without regard for the carbon emissions that extraction will ultimately generate.

THE REVENUE PROBLEM
The numbers, by the government’s own account, are substantial. Under the landmark agreement with Hess Corporation, Guyana committed to selling 37.5 million ART TREES credits between 2022 and 2032 for a minimum of US$750 million, with upside sharing provisions if market prices rise. The revenue has been flowing. US$187.5 million had been received as at January 2024 from the first commercial sale.

By any reconstruction of the publicly available figures — including President Ali’s own disclosure in May 2026 — the three-year cumulative total is now approaching US$400 million: approximately US$150 million received in 2023, US$87.5 million in 2024, and revenues approaching US$200 million for 2025 alone. These are not figures produced by investigative reconstruction or opposition estimates. They are the President’s own numbers, offered on a public platform.

“That matters, because the same administration that volunteers these headline figures has constructed no independent institutional architecture to account for them.”

There is no carbon revenue equivalent of the Natural Resource Fund Act — no legislated transparency framework requiring parliamentary scrutiny of inflows, no independent audit mandate, no public register of how revenues are received, held, and disbursed before they reach community benefit-sharing allocations. The Natural Resource Fund, for all its structural weaknesses this publication has documented, at least exists as a legislated instrument with defined governance obligations. Carbon revenues flow through no equivalent framework.

What governs community benefit-sharing is the Vice President’s discretion. Without consultation, the government decided to allocate 26.5% of the 2024 income from the sale of jurisdictional forest-carbon credits — equivalent to EUR 21.4 million — to 241 Amerindian Village and hinterland communities. The word “decided” carries the full weight of the problem. There is no legislation mandating the percentage. There is no independent oversight body. There is no parliamentary committee with jurisdiction over the allocation methodology. The percentage is set unilaterally by the Vice President and announced at the National Toshaos Council conference.

In May 2025, Guyana for a second consecutive year adjusted the share of proceeds allocated to Amerindian communities, keeping absolute financial benefits nominally the same. Read carefully, this formulation reveals what the government does not say plainly: if absolute benefits remain the same while the percentage share is adjusted downward, total revenues increased — and the additional increment went elsewhere, to destinations that no public document explains.

“The Vice President is projecting a US$4 to US$5 billion carbon sector. The communities whose forests underpin every dollar of that projection are before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.”

The scale of what is coming makes the governance gap not merely a present concern but an urgent structural emergency. Vice President Jagdeo has publicly projected that Guyana’s carbon credit sector could eventually generate US$2 billion annually — and at full scale, potentially US$4 to US$5 billion. If those projections materialise, Guyana will be managing a carbon revenue stream that rivals or exceeds its current oil revenue allocations to the Natural Resource Fund, governed by no law, audited by no independent body, and allocated at the discretion of one office.

The nation was told the oil money would be different — ring-fenced, governed,transparent, intergenerationally protected. The Natural Resource Fund Act was the response to that promise, however imperfectly implemented. No equivalent promise has been made about carbon revenues. No equivalent legislation has been proposed. And yet the Vice President is projecting a multi-billion-dollar sector while the communities whose forests underpin every dollar of that projection are before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights arguing they were never properly consulted.

This is not a footnote. It is the central accountability failure of the LCDS as currently administered.

THE CHEVRON COMPLICATION
The transfer of the Hess carbon credit obligation to Chevron through the July 2025 acquisition introduces a dimension the government has conspicuously declined to address. Chevron is a company whose core business model — offshore oil extraction in Guyana’s own waters — is in direct tension with the forest conservation rationale underpinning the credits it has inherited. Whether Chevron will continue purchasing credits at the contracted pace, seek to renegotiate terms, or treat the obligation as a legacy liability to be wound down is unknown.

No public statement from the Office of the President, the Ministry of Natural Resources, or the LCDS Secretariat has addressed the implications of this corporate transfer for Guyana’s carbon revenue projections or contractual security. No parliamentary question has been tabled. No independent legal review has been published. The deal that the government describes as the centrepiece of its climate financing architecture passed into the hands of a different corporation without a word of public scrutiny.

This silence is not incidental. It is structural. An administration that has built its climate credibility on the Hess deal cannot easily acknowledge that the counterparty to that deal no longer exists as an independent entity — and that its successor is an oil major whose climate commitments and appetite for voluntary carbon credits may differ fundamentally from its predecessor’s.

WHAT ACCOUNTABILITY REQUIRES
The 592 Guardian puts the following questions directly to the Office of the President, the Ministry of Natural Resources, and the LCDS Secretariat. We invite formal written responses, which will be published in full.

1.President Ali disclosed in May 2026 that carbon credit revenues for 2025 would approach US$200 million, bringing the three-year cumulative total to approximately US$400 million. In which account or accounts are these revenues held, and under what legislative authority are they governed?

2.What is the complete revenue schedule — by vintage year, issuance volume, and price per tonne — for all credits sold under the Hess/Chevron agreement to date?

3.What are the specific contractual terms governing the transition of the Hess credit purchase agreement to Chevron, and has the government received independent legal advice on whether that transition required any renegotiation or novation? Will that advice be made public?

4.On what legislative or regulatory basis does the Vice President determine the community benefit-sharing percentage each year, and why has no legislation been introduced to codify, protect, and independently audit that allocation?

5.Which independent auditor has examined the full carbon revenue account — not merely community disbursements — and when will that audit be published?

6.Does the government accept the APA’s position that free, prior and informed consent was not obtained from individual communities before the December 2022 credit issuance? If not, which specific community-level consent votes, conducted before that issuance, does it rely upon?

7.Have airline buyers of Guyana’s CORSIA-eligible credits been formally informed of the APA’s complaint alleging violation of the Cancún Safeguards, and of ART’s dismissal of that complaint on procedural grounds without substantive examination?

8.Given Vice President Jagdeo’s projection of US$2–5 billion in annual carbon revenues at scale, will the government introduce legislation to govern this revenue stream with the same institutional architecture as the Natural Resource Fund?

 THE TIMELINE ART WANTS BURIED

 The 592 Guardian is Guyana’s independent accountability journalism outlet. We invite formal written responses from the Office of the President, the Ministry of Natural Resources, the LCDS Secretariat, and the Amerindian Peoples Association to the questions posed above. Responses will be published in full and unedited.