Carbon Credits and Peoples of the Territory State laws for a just climate metabolism First-Person Consciousness — Brain Bee “When the air gets heavy in my chest before it becomes a line on a spreadsheet” I was a single egg cell before I was a
Carbon Credits and Peoples of the Territory
State laws for a just climate metabolism
First-Person Consciousness — Brain Bee
“When the air gets heavy in my chest before it becomes a line on a spreadsheet”
I was a single egg cell before I was a citizen.
At the beginning, I was just metabolism: a bubble of life receiving oxygen, nutrients and information from my mother’s body. Every heartbeat of hers said to my body: “there is a future.” Before any word, before any ideology, I was pure interoception – heartbeats, temperature, the flow of air going in and out of my lungs.
Then came the first years of life: I still didn’t know how to say “climate”, “carbon” or “Amazon”, but I could feel in my body when the air was good, when the rain came at the right time, when the sun was too harsh. My consciousness was born from this silent dialogue between body and territory – what I call Body-Territory.
Today, as a digital adolescent, I wake up to notifications about “carbon credits”, “voluntary markets”, “offsets”, “REDD+”, “greenwashing”. I see forests turned into numbers and communities turned into “stakeholders”. I see Indigenous Peoples, Quilombola communities and riverine peoples being called “beneficiaries” of projects they never wrote. And I, breathing overheated city air, am invited to “offset” emissions by clicking on tree-planting banners.
Within this noise, my first-person Brain Bee consciousness has to make a decision:
either I accept that climate is a technical problem for markets,
or I remember that the air entering my chest is the same that crosses forests, rivers, villages and urban peripheries.
When I look from this angle, I stop being only “me” and start feeling something broader – what I want to call State JIWASA: a State where the key pronoun is not “my profit” but “our metabolism”.
If climate is everyone’s problem, laws must also breathe like living systems. And that’s where councilors, state representatives, federal deputies and senators come in: not as managers of carbon spreadsheets, but as architects of a just climate metabolism, where peoples of the territory are the heart of the system, not just the decorative frame of reports.
This blog is my attempt to write, in first person, from my body,
what state laws would look like if they treated carbon credits as tools of justice –
and not as a new form of climate colonialism.
1. From body to climate: living metabolism, not abstract market
In the dominant logic, a carbon credit is a unit of account: one ton of CO₂ equivalent. It enters formulas, models, balance sheets, derivatives. But my body does not feel “tons”; it feels temperature, dry air, floods, droughts, food insecurity, migration.
Recent literature on carbon finance and climate justice shows that carbon markets can either reduce emissions or deepen inequalities, depending on participation rules, transparency, and how benefits are shared.
In other words: there is no metabolic neutrality. Every law that structures a carbon market is choosing who will breathe better and who will bear the weight of the crisis.
If I start from my first-person consciousness, the question changes:
it’s no longer “how do we make the market work?”,
but “who breathes better after this law?”.
2. Carbon, colonialism and peoples of the territory
Several recent studies show that Indigenous Peoples and traditional communities protect a disproportionate share of forests and biodiversity, holding massive carbon stocks in their territories.
At the same time, a growing body of work denounces the risk of “carbon colonialism” – when market mechanisms are used to capture land, decisions and futures of these peoples under the label of “green projects”.
Recent reports and investigations show, for example:
opaque contracts, in heavy legal English, lasting 30, 50 or even 100 years over Indigenous lands;
promises of financial benefits that either do not materialize or arrive in highly unequal ways;
cases where projects linked to carbon credits involve actors already fined for illegal deforestation, as revealed by deep investigative work in the Brazilian Amazon.
At the global level, analyses point out that most countries still do not fully recognize the carbon rights of Indigenous Peoples, Afro-descendant Peoples and local communities, even where land tenure rights are partially acknowledged.
In simple terms:
those who care for the carbon are not, legally, the owners of the carbon.
From a JIWASA standpoint, this is a serious metabolic error: the system drains energy away from those who keep the organism alive and transfers it to those who speculate on top of it.
3. Brazil between two futures: regulated market or climate “far west”?
Brazil has started to build a Brazilian Emissions Trading System (SBCE) under a recent federal law, bringing the country closer to regulated carbon markets already in place elsewhere.
At the same time, the country has approved a CONAREDD+ Resolution (No. 19/2025) reinforcing the need for participation of local communities, transparency and respect for social and environmental safeguards in jurisdictional REDD+ programs.
These two movements show that we are at a bifurcation point:
either we move toward a model where State JIWASA organizes the market as a tool of territorial justice,
or we let carbon become another “extractive cycle”, repeating the pattern of mining, soy and cattle – now with a “green” label.
Recent investigations into Amazonian carbon projects indicate that, without strict rules, transparency and social control, the voluntary market is easily captured by actors with a history of environmental illegality.
From the standpoint of my body, this means:
I breathe propaganda about climate justice, but inhale the smoke of real fires.
4. What would a “JIWASA Carbon Credit” be?
If I start from the idea that the citizen is the basic unit of the State and is its co-creator, a carbon credit is not a “neutral financial asset”; it is a derivative of the metabolic work of a living territory – forests, rivers, soils, human and non-human communities.
A JIWASA Carbon Credit must obey some principles:
Carbon as a territorial right, not only as a private asset.
The right over carbon must follow the right over territory and the way of life that sustains it.
Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) as a non-negotiable clause.
Without real FPIC, any project in Indigenous, Quilombola or traditional territories is capture, not partnership.
Fair benefit-sharing
Most of the revenue generated must stay with those who live in and care for the territory, not with intermediaries, consultancies and financial platforms.
Radical transparency
All contracts, financial flows and methodologies must be public, auditable and readable by the communities involved.
Linkage to a just climate metabolism
Carbon revenue cannot exist just to “offset” someone else’s pollution; it must fund local just transition, strengthening food systems, education, health, mobility and autonomy.
5. The role of state laws: from “green business” to climate metabolism
This is where municipal councilors and state representatives come in. They can transform what is today a “far west” of private deals into a system of metabolic rules aligned with State JIWASA.
Some legislative guidelines I propose:
State Law on Carbon Rights of Peoples of the Territory
Recognize, in state law, that any carbon project in Indigenous, Quilombola or traditional territories is only valid if:
FPIC is proven, with processes translated and accompanied by the Public Defender’s Office and the Public Prosecutor’s Office;
contracts are time-limited, with mandatory periodic review;
most financial benefits are legally required to flow to the communities.
State public registry of carbon projects
Create a single online registry of all carbon projects in the state, with:
maps, summarized contracts, beneficiaries, amounts and audits;
integration with deforestation, fire and environmental infraction data.
State Climate Metabolic Fund
Establish that part of carbon-related revenues (including from state-owned companies) must flow into a Climate Metabolic Fund, dedicated to:
climate adaptation for vulnerable communities;
low-carbon health, education and mobility policies;
research and innovation in clean and biomimetic technologies.
Integration with DREX Cidadão
Use part of carbon revenue, in the form of public yield, to feed a Climate DREX Cidadão:
a minimum daily flow of economic energy for each citizen – not as charity, but as participation in the State’s metabolism;
possibly linked to climate education milestones, participation in JIWASA assemblies and concrete acts of territorial care.
JIWASA Councils for Climate Governance
Create state-level councils with mandatory representation from Indigenous Peoples, Quilombola communities, traditional communities, youth, researchers and public managers to:
monitor carbon projects;
deliberate on the use of funds;
assess impacts on social and ecological metabolism.
6. Constitutional anchoring for JIWASA
When I propose this design for a just climate metabolism, I am not stepping outside the 1988 Constitution. On the contrary: I am taking seriously what it already wrote.
Three articles, for me, are pillars of what I call a JIWASA Carbon Credit:
Article 1, sole paragraph – “All power emanates from the people”
If all power emanates from the people, then the power to decide about climate, territory and carbon also emanates from the people.
This means that the citizen is the basic unit of the State, and that carbon markets or climate policies which exclude real popular participation violate the spirit of this article.
What I call State JIWASA is precisely to apply this principle to the climate metabolism: there is no legitimacy without the people deciding about their own air, water and forests.
Article 225 – Right to an ecologically balanced environment
The Constitution states that “everyone has the right to an ecologically balanced environment, which is a common asset of the people and essential to a healthy quality of life,” and that the Government and the community have the duty to defend and preserve it for present and future generations.
When I speak of a just climate metabolism, I am simply translating this article into metabolic language:
climate is part of this “common asset”;
carbon credits that harm communities violate this right;
state laws that protect peoples of the territory, share benefits fairly and reduce emissions are fulfilling the constitutional duty to defend the environment.
Article 231 – Original rights of Indigenous Peoples over the lands they traditionally occupy
The Constitution recognizes the original rights of Indigenous Peoples over their lands and guarantees their exclusive usufruct of the riches of the soil, rivers and lakes located there.
Today, the carbon stored in these forests and soils is one of those “riches”.
When I argue that any carbon project in Indigenous lands must have FPIC, fair benefit-sharing and community control, I’m simply taking Article 231 to its logical conclusion: those who hold original rights over the territory must hold original rights over carbon-related benefits.
In short, the 1988 Federal Constitution already contains, in its core, the seed of a climate-aware State JIWASA.
What is missing is not legal text, but political metabolism to make it real.
7. From Brain Bee to State JIWASA: closing the loop
If I go back to my first-person Brain Bee consciousness, I remember:
I began as pure metabolism;
I became a subject in a culture that taught money as the meaning of life;
now I live in a time when even climate is turned into a financial asset.
The risk is losing the basic intuition of the body:
without living territory, there is no economy;
without peoples of the territory, there is no standing forest;
without climate justice, there is no shared future.
What I am proposing with these state laws is simple and radical at the same time:
carbon cannot be just another extractive cycle;
it must become Future Memory: a contract in which the present assumes explicit responsibility for future generations.
When councilors, state representatives and senators write laws from this JIWASA consciousness – in which the State is not an abstract machine but the sum of the bodies breathing inside it – carbon credits cease to be a “green business” and become a policy of climate belonging.
As a citizen, I don’t want just to “offset” emissions.
I want to recompose the broken metabolism between body, territory and future.
Post-2020 References
(Carbon credits, climate justice and peoples of the territory)
Munonye, J., & Munonye, C. (2025). Carbon Finance for Climate Justice: Pathways to Inclusive Sustainable Development. IPS Intelligentsia Multidisciplinary Journal, 4(1), 54–62.
Durmaz, S. (2025). Indigenous Contestations of Carbon Markets, Carbon Colonialism, and Power Dynamics in International Climate Negotiations. Climate, 13(8), 158.
Rights and Resources Initiative & McGill University. (2025). The Carbon Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Afro-descendant Peoples, and Local Communities in Tropical and Subtropical Lands and Forests.
Redvers, N. et al. (2025). Carbon markets: a new form of colonialism for Indigenous Peoples? The Lancet Planetary Health.
Osborne, T. (2024). Climate justice, forests, and Indigenous Peoples: toward an equitable framework.
Ayompe, L. M. (2025). Achieving climate justice: addressing disparities in carbon markets and climate finance.
Yankey, G. (2024). Indigenous Peoples and Carbon Pricing: Inclusion, Rights and Policy Design in Emerging Carbon Markets.
GCF Task Force. (2024). Brazil Establishes Its Emissions Trading System (SBCE) with Law No. 15,042.
Ecosystem Marketplace. (2025). Brazil’s CONAREDD+ Resolution 19: Advancing Jurisdictional REDD+ with Community Rights at the Center.
Haynes, B. et al. (2025). Illegal loggers profit from Brazil’s carbon credit projects. Reuters.
Mongabay (2025). Paradise for carbon cowboys? Questionable carbon deals and Indigenous resistance in the Amazon.
RBC Capital Markets (2024). Brazil’s Regulated Carbon Market: An Inflection Point for Global Climate Finance.
