THE SACRIFICE OF DISTRIBUTIVE INJUSTICE IN CARBON OFFSETTING

Abstract

Carbon offsetting promoted as a cost-effective and equitable mechanism for global climate mitigation, promising win-win benefits and climate finance flows to communities hosting rich carbon sinks and with the least carbon footprint in the global south. The findings of this paper has reveals several contradictions to the stated claims, demonstrating that carbon offset projects systematically violate principles of distributive justice and produce what is conceptualized here as 'carbon neutrality sacrifice zones'-peripheral territories in the Global South where communities forfeit land, livelihoods, and cultural continuity for the carbon neutrality demand of others' in the global north. Drawing on distributive justice dimension of the environmental justice framework, and through systematic analysis of 19 documented forest-based carbon offset projects across Africa, Latin America, and Asia, the paper identifies five dimensions of distributive injustice: restrictions on land and resource rights; inadequate compensation and unequal benefit sharing, disruptions to community life, labour exploitation and gendered impacts. The analysis further reveals that carbon market verification systems are structurally compromised, enabling the generation and sale of inflated or fictitious carbon credits that allow industrial polluters to make unfounded claims of climate responsibility. These findings challenge the "win-win" narrative of carbon markets, revealing instead a mechanism that reproduces colonial patterns of extraction and deepens global socioecological inequalities. The paper illuminates useful insights for policy recommendations that address these injustices, enhances the credibility of carbon offsetting process and safeguards the rights and livelihoods of offset providing communities towards a truly just climate transition.