The real victims of the £2-a-day Amazon scheme are London's offset brokers

The University of Bath has just released a study showing that giving Indigenous people in the Peruvian Amazon £2 a day "helps protect the rainforest." Apparently, a staggering 90% of participants in this unconditional basic income pilot adopted environmentally beneficial practices. It sounds wonderful to the untrained ear. It sounds like a victory. But as someone who has spent the last decade in the trenches of high-level climate negotiations, I find this entire approach deeply, deeply troubling.

Let that sink in. We are facing a planetary crisis, and the best these researchers can come up with is handing loose change directly to the people who actually live in the ecosystem. No oversight committees. No multilateral stakeholder engagement phases. Just giving them cash and trusting them to manage their own land. It is a stunningly naive abdication of our responsibility to overcomplicate the transition.

I was having lunch just last week with a senior architect of the carbon offset market following the latest COP summit in Dubai. We were picking at our sea bass, exhausted—truly exhausted—by the sheer weight of saving the world. He pointed out the obvious flaw in the Bath study: where is the friction? Where is the global supply chain of white-collar intervention?

A healthy, sustainable conservation effort requires infrastructure. It requires a European consultancy to draft a 400-page feasibility assessment. It requires satellite imaging startups, blockchain verification protocols, and a dedicated task force of young professionals who fly business class to Lima to explain the concept of stranded assets to villagers through a translator. That is how you build a resilient green economy.

If we normalize the idea that protecting globally important ecosystems costs £2 a day per person, we threaten to entirely collapse the multi-billion-dollar climate-industrial complex that so many of us have worked tirelessly to build. You cannot simply bypass the innovators.

What happens when these Indigenous communities receive their £2 unconditionally? They might buy immediate necessities. They might maintain their ancestral practices. But are they leveraging that capital to generate tradable credits on a secondary market? Are they providing a multinational oil conglomerate with the exact mathematical offset required to claim a net-zero earnings call? Of course not. They are selfishly hoarding the climate benefits for the physical reality of the Earth, rather than sharing them with the corporate ledgers that truly need them.

I have seen firsthand the incredible work being done by corporate sustainability officers who haven't seen a tree in fifteen years, but who can manipulate a spreadsheet until a new coal plant technically counts as a reforestation project. These are the unsung heroes of our era. To suggest their work could be replaced by tossing a two-pound coin to a Peruvian farmer is not just offensive; it is anti-progress.

We must demand more from our philanthropic pilots. A proper basic income scheme in the Amazon should, at the very least, require recipients to download a proprietary app, link it to an enterprise ESG dashboard, and attend a quarterly webinar on leveraging their canopy coverage for scalable synergies.

I will be raising this exact point at my next panel in Davos. Someone has to speak up for the vulnerable offset brokers whose livelihoods are threatened by this reckless efficiency. Until then, I can only pray that the University of Bath realizes the damage they have done, before someone tries to save the Great Barrier Reef without paying a single public relations firm.