When Saving Forests Means Taking Them: The Green Grabbing Debate Over Carbon Concessions

A quiet but consequential transformation is sweeping across the rural landscapes of the Global South. From the wind-swept plains of northeastern Brazil to the forest frontiers of Zambia and Malawi, ecosystems are being revalued, repackaged, and sold in the name of environmental protection. A new perspective article published in Frontiers in Sustainable Resource Management argues that this transformation, often celebrated as a win for climate and biodiversity, may in fact be reproducing one of the oldest injustices in the global economy: the dispossession of rural communities from their land. The study, led by Yamikani Harry Makwinja of Technische Universität Dresden and the United Nations University, together with Belinda Makare of the University of the Free State, examines whether the booming market for conservation concessions represents genuine green investment or a novel form of what scholars call green grabbing.

Green grabbing describes the appropriation of land and resources legitimized by environmental agendas, whether for biodiversity conservation, carbon sequestration, ecosystem services, ecotourism, or renewable energy production. The term emerged from the older concept of land grabbing, which gained prominence in 2008 after the global food price crisis triggered a wave of large-scale land acquisitions in the Global South by foreign investors seeking to secure agricultural production. But as the new analysis makes clear, environmental concerns themselves have become core drivers of land appropriation, creating novel forms of valuation and accumulation. Unlike classical land grabs, which rely on overt coercion or market mechanisms alone, green grabbing operates through a distinctive mechanism in which environmental justifications disarm opposition and attract support from constituencies unlikely to endorse conventional dispossession.

At the center of the debate is the conservation concession model, a contractual arrangement in which a government or landholder transfers management rights over a specified territory to a concessionaire, typically a conservation organization, private company, or hybrid entity, in exchange for payments or investments to achieve defined conservation outcomes. Proponents, including major international financial institutions and conservation organizations, frame these concessions as pragmatic and efficient mechanisms for protecting ecologically valuable landscapes while generating economic benefits for host nations. Crucially, contemporary concessions are increasingly funded not by philanthropic donations but by anticipated revenues from carbon credit sales, transforming the incentive structure from an ongoing donor subsidy to financial self-sufficiency through the commodification of forest carbon. This shift, the authors argue, fundamentally alters the politics of conservation.

To evaluate when a conservation intervention crosses the line into green grabbing, the researchers propose a set of analytical criteria drawn from critical agrarian studies and political economy. These include changes in access rights, dispossession or exclusion of land users, the absence of meaningful consent under the Free, Prior, and Informed Consent framework, inequitable distribution of costs and benefits, and the transfer of decision-making authority from customary institutions to external actors. The framework also examines how livelihoods are affected across natural, social, human, physical, and financial capital, and how power asymmetries shape who benefits and who loses from conservation interventions.

The empirical heart of the study lies in Malawi, where the authors draw on fifteen years of fieldwork experience, 67 key informant interviews, 12 focus group discussions, and non-participant observation conducted between December 2025 and March 2026. The primary case is the Mamaland carbon concession, announced in early 2026 as the most significant and controversial conservation initiative in the country’s history. The agreement involves the Portuguese construction conglomerate Mota-Engil, through its agroforestry subsidiary, and the Singaporean commodity trader Trafigura, who together will market carbon credits generated from 550,000 hectares of Malawian forest reserves over a 40-year period. The reserves include South Viphya, Dwambazi, Dzalanyama, Michiru, and Chimaliro, forests that surrounding communities have relied upon for generations.

The Mamaland concession exhibits what the authors identify as four critical governance failures. First, Malawi’s Forestry Act and Land Act contain no reference to carbon rights, meaning the ownership of carbon sequestered on forest reserves remains legally untested and potentially subject to dispute. Under the prevailing operational assumption that land or tree ownership confers carbon ownership, the concession effectively claims rights to ecosystem services that were never explicitly allocated through any legislative process. Second, no publicly disclosed benefit-sharing terms exist; the government’s framework suggests a 5 percent community entitlement, but its application remains unclear. Third, community leaders reported meetings that could not adequately explain how long the land would remain under concession or what share of revenue would return to local people, raising serious questions about whether genuine consent was ever obtained. Fourth, the 40-year term contains no review clause for renegotiation as carbon prices evolve, locking in communities and government to a fixed arrangement that exceeds standard cycles of democratic accountability.

The consequences of these design failures are not abstract. With over 96 percent of Malawian households relying on biomass for cooking fuel, restrictions on forest access for carbon preservation impose immediate costs on the most vulnerable populations. In practice, the avoided-deforestation model criminalizes traditional livelihood practices such as shifting cultivation, fuelwood collection, and the harvesting of non-timber forest products like medicinal plants, honey, and thatch grass. These activities constitute the daily subsistence strategies of surrounding communities, and their reclassification as illegal extraction risks exacerbating poverty and generating local resistance that ultimately undermines long-term conservation goals. As one key informant observed during a community meeting, if people are fenced out to protect the carbon, the result is not a project but a conflict.

The study also documents how conservation concessions reconfigure rural class dynamics. In Majete Wildlife Reserve, managed by African Parks under a delegated management agreement, new community-based organizations were established that report to park managers rather than to democratically elected village development committees, creating what community members describe as a parallel governance system. Employment opportunities are concentrated among those with formal education or political connections, while poorer households who rely more directly on common-pool resources for subsistence are disproportionately harmed by access restrictions. This pattern of differentiated dispossession empowers a new cadre of conservation-oriented elites while marginalizing the agrarian poor, a dynamic also documented in Madagascar, where the collapse of state capacity led to a stark division between high-paid foreign workers and low-wage local staff.

Yet the analysis is not uniformly pessimistic. The Kulera REDD+ Programme, operating in the Nyika and Vwaza landscapes of Malawi, demonstrates that inclusive benefit-sharing is operationally feasible when communities are structured as partners rather than passive beneficiaries. The Nyika-Vwaza Association and the Nkhotakota Wildlife Reserve Association employ their own staff, participate in carbon credit pricing decisions, and engage in participatory budgeting, with 25 percent of park resources and fees flowing to registered community associations. This stands in sharp contrast to the Mamaland model and suggests that the problem lies not in conservation itself but in the institutional conditions under which it is implemented. The authors also document forms of community resistance, from deliberate non-compliance with access restrictions to vocal opposition at meetings and social ostracism of perceived collaborators.

Looking forward, the researchers call for a foundational shift toward radical land tenure security, community-led forest governance, and agroecological perspectives that treat agricultural production and forest conservation as complementary rather than oppositional objectives. They propose that any future conservation investment be assessed against threshold questions: whether it respects existing governance structures, whether benefit-sharing terms are publicly disclosed and legally enforceable, whether communities hold genuine decision-making authority beyond mere consultation, and whether viable alternatives to displaced livelihoods are provided. Investments failing to satisfy all four criteria should be subject to heightened scrutiny. The stakes could not be higher, as the 40-year lock-in of the Mamaland concession means decisions made today will shape Malawian forests and livelihoods until 2066. Whether this legacy is judged as climate leadership or carbon colonialism depends on actions taken in the immediate window to retrofit transparency, accountability, and genuine inclusion into agreements that remain dangerously opaque.

Subject of Research: The socio-ecological impacts and governance failures of conservation concessions as a form of green grabbing in the Global South

Article Title: Conservation concessions or green grabbing? A critical perspective on mega conservation investments

Article References: Makwinja, Y. H., & Makare, B. (2026). Conservation concessions or green grabbing? A critical perspective on mega conservation investments. Frontiers in Sustainable Resource Management, 5, Article 1819454. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsrma.2026.1819454

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fsrma.2026.1819454

Keywords: green grabbing, conservation concessions, carbon credits, land rights, Malawi, critical agrarian studies, forest governance, rural livelihoods, neoliberal conservation, dispossession, REDD+, political economy