What refugee camps can teach carbon markets about lasting impact

Scroll through most carbon projects’ promotional material, and you will find the same formula: a before-and-after photograph of a restored landscape, accompanied by the number of tonnes of carbon removed or emissions avoided.

These images tell a compelling story of environmental transformation, but leave out the most important question: who will still be protecting that landscape twenty years from now?

Two shifts are reshaping that question. Governments are finally putting into practice the Paris Agreement’s rules for international carbon trading. At the same time, the Science Based Targets initiative, the body that sets climate targets for the world’s largest companies, has just published a new standard that, for the first time, formally recognises businesses for using high-integrity carbon credits alongside cutting their own emissions, and will require the largest companies to start buying carbon removals from 2035.

Together, these point to rising demand for credits as discussions have shifted from whether carbon markets should exist, to how they can scale responsibly.

Carbon markets are increasingly sophisticated at measuring tonnes of emissions. But while better methodologies, monitoring and verification are essential, this focus risks creating carbon tunnel vision: cutting emissions is prioritised, while the wider social and environmental conditions that make those cuts possible get overlooked.

As the market matures, success must also be judged on whether those benefits can be sustained. That depends on the people living alongside these projects. Communities protect forests, restore degraded land, adopt cleaner technology, and maintain projects long after they are built. Community representatives help identify risks, shape implementation, and agree how benefits are shared.

The industry needs to rethink its position on communities as secondary “co-benefits”: they are in fact the “core” benefits that determine whether climate impacts endure.

This is the idea behind the United Nations Refugee Agency’s Refugee Environmental Protection (REP) Fund. In some of the world’s largest refugee camps, communities are planting trees, restoring degraded land and switching to cleaner cookstoves.

Rather than applying a single model across different countries, REP Fund projects are designed around local governance, community priorities and long-term stewardship. In return, people receive tangible benefits, including jobs, skills and cleaner energy, while projects are being built, rather than waiting years for carbon revenue to arrive. Their trust and ongoing involvement decide whether climate benefits hold for the decades needed to deliver lasting impacts or fade once funding ends.

A seedling planted through a one-off payment can easily be abandoned. A community with a long-term stake in a landscape becomes its guardian.

This matters because, although people forced from their homes are among those most exposed to the effects of climate change, extremely fragile states receive around US$2 per person annually in adaptation funding, compared with around US$160 per person in non-fragile states. If durable climate action is possible in some of the most extreme circumstances facing displaced people, it should be possible almost anywhere.

Nature and climate investments are increasingly attracting private capital, and there is growing recognition that climate and biodiversity cannot be separated. But treating ecosystems purely as investable assets carries the same risk as treating communities as passive beneficiaries rather than active partners: it mistakes what holds a project together over time.

Gold Standard, the carbon crediting programme established in 2003 by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and other international NGOs, has incorporated wider development outcomes into project requirements. Every project certified must show verified contributions to at least three of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), on the principle that climate projects should benefit people as well as the planet.

Building community impact into project design from the start can produce significant value. Clean cooking projects continue to deliver the greatest social value by improving health outcomes, saving on fuels, lowering pressure on forests, and fostering gender equality by giving women more time for work or education. They generate an average of US$267 of shared value per carbon credit, and in 2025, Gold Standard generated an estimated US$7.2bn in shared value from cookstove projects.

The market asks how many tonnes of carbon a project can deliver. But carbon projects are not only about carbon. They are about land, nature, people, governance, institutions and trust. The next test is to recognise this reality and determine who will still be protecting those tonnes decades from now, in refugee camps and everywhere else carbon finance reaches. This will decide both which projects succeed, and whether the market itself endures.

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