Three Indigenous communities in Peru’s Amazon are no longer engaging in unsustainable or illegal forest activities to make ends meet as they complete one year of a conservation basic income (CBI) pilot project, according to an internal assessment. The ‘no strings attached’ direct cash transfers is one of the world’s first pilot projects directed at Indigenous communities.

“By having less economic stress and food insecurity, the income allows local people, especially women, to lead conservation efforts and have more decision-making capacity,” said Ketty Marcelo, president of National Organization of Andean and Amazonian Indigenous Women of Peru (ONAMIAP), one of the local partner organizations for the pilot project.

The two-year pilot project, which was started in November 2023 by NGO Cool Earth, gives unconditional cash transfers to three Indigenous Asháninka and Yánesha communities in western Peru’s Junín region. All 188 adults in these communities receive cash payments of 258 soles ($69) every month to help them meet their daily needs.

Since economic resources were insufficient to support family members previously, Marcelo said, communities that used to safeguard these territories resorted to logging prized wood and renting out their lands to agriculture work to feed and support their families. The project provides the families with enough money for three meals a day and to send their children to school.

Impacts and data on forest cover and health were not collected during the latest assessment of the pilot project in November 2024, which focused on qualitative impacts. However, project organizers said that at the end of the pilot in November 2025, they will co-design “the best way to measure impacts on the forest” with Indigenous leaders and the community.

There are not yet any independent assessments of the pilot project.

While studies show that poverty and external pressures can push communities into unsustainable deforestation to meet basic needs, the effectiveness of “unconditional” conservation cash transfers to meet these challenges is under debate and currently being tested in other pilot projects around the world.

Bram Büscher, one of the professors at the Wageningen University & Research who formally raised the idea of a ‘conservation basic income’ in a journal in 2020, said they got the idea after research showed market-based conditional conservation instruments “often don’t achieve their goals at all.” The little money that flowed to communities also rarely achieved predicted levels of bottom-up economic development, he said. The idea is to instead let people decide for themselves how to best use the money.

However, current evidence for CBI to protect forests and biodiversity is scant, and some researchers worry it can lead to unintended impacts, like increasing communities’ dependency on financial institutions or an influx of people to sensitive, biodiversity-rich regions for ‘free’ money.

For the moment, while the pilot project is being carried out, the exact locations of the communities are kept hidden for security purposes.

Cash for adaptation

The three communities live in an area of the Amazon rainforest covering 738 hectares (1,823 acres) of communal territory containing an estimated 163,000 trees that sequester 300,000 tons of carbon. The communities live in the UNESCO-recognized Bosques de Neblina—Selva Central and Avireri-Vraem biosphere reserve.

The first and second internal assessment of the pilot showed the communities used the cash transfers for food, medical care, education and investment in farming. But this was not how the communities’ expenses looked a few decades ago, said an Asháninka leader and member of the Organization for Indigenous Women of the Central Selva of Peru (OMIAASEC), another partner of the project.

“Before, we had to [rent] our lands, cut down trees to meet our daily needs and send our children to school,” said the leader, who chose to remain anonymous for security concerns.

Traditionally, most families made ends meet by planting crops like rice, cassava (yuca), coffee, cocoa, corn and bananas on small plots of land for subsistence and income. The women gathered food and resources from the forest while the men went hunting or fishing. But with increased wildfires and climate change impacts like droughts, diseases and pests, it was not possible to live the traditional way.

“Now, the climate crisis has impacted the plants and crops, and we have lost seed varieties of cassava (yuca) which means there are no good harvests as before,” said the leader.

“Our products also can no longer compete with genetically modified seeds. [Higher] yield crops sell at good prices in the market, but our ancestral quality seeds produce little. The price offered is low,” the leader told Mongabay, adding that some in his community now depended on fertilizers to compete.

The two-year pilot selected these communities because they shared close cultural ties with their territories, said Patricia Quiñonez, a manager of unconditional cash transfers for Cool Earth, even if they had to give in to illegal economies.

A few women are using the additional income to start small communal businesses in weaving and jewellery, create plant nurseries, reforest and care for water sources.

“The basic income allows them to have the resources and time to continue these practices,” she says. The crafts, purses, earrings and necklaces they make are to sell to visitors outside the community for extra income.

“While it is true that the money is temporary, we try to see it as seed capital that allows us to build initiatives that will help us in the future to be self-reliant and gain autonomy over our forests and territories,” the leader tells Mongabay.

The nurseries are reviving a few traditionally used medicinal plant species used by the communities’ ancestors, like huayruro (Ormosia coccinea) and fruit trees like anonilla (Annona dolichophylla) and meronki (Brosimum lactescens). The Asháninka community people hope to plant over 2,000 woody and forest plants that have disappeared at the hands of illegal logging by invaders.

“We [community people] see basic income cash transfers not as aid but as a form of reparation to Indigenous peoples to steward conservation in the best ways possible,” said Marcelo.

The conservation basic income debate

The Peruvian pilot project tries to assess whether unconditional cash transfers can help support communities to better conserve the forest cover that they call home.

According to Ashwin Ravikumar at the department of environmental studies at Amherst College, Massachusetts, issues with Peru’s current conditional conservation payment programs to communities, like the National Forest Conservation Program (NFCP), make unconditional cash transfers enticing to them. Deborah Delgado Pugley, associate professor of sociology at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, agreed. A tested scenario of cash programs launched by the state government, Pugley said, shows that Indigenous communities criticized the conditional programs as not flexible to community needs and choices on the ground.

Instead, they preferred a scheme where Indigenous peoples can have more freedom with where to invest and what to do with the money.

“What most likely happens with the conditional cash programs is that a hired local consultant convinces the community people that the only activity they can do is have chickens, which is something that won’t work in the place where they are, and that ends up being a failure,” she told Mongabay.

However, some researchers on unconditional cash payments for conservation also have their doubts. Subsistence is but one driver of deforestation, there are already trust issues between donors and communities, and these payments don’t address the source of the problem which is often context-specific, they said.

“You’re putting a lot of faith that providing people with money for a basic income will lead to positive conservation outcomes,” Carla Archibald, a research fellow at Deakin University in Australia and co-author of a paper on basic income, told Mongabay in 2023.

The few studies into pilot projects in some parts of the world make the case for CBI while detracting from it in others. In Sierra Leone and Mexico, there were spikes in deforestation, at least in the short term. Proponents of the payment structure acknowledge that, while it could take the pressure off of resources, it could also allow people to buy equipment for land clearance or move into sensitive areas.

In Indigenous communities that are not yet dependent on cash, unconditional payments could accelerate dependency on commodity markets which, in some ways, devalues Indigenous ideas and approaches of conservation, said Ravikumar.

The best tools for conservation might actually be communities “having full access to basic services like healthcare, education, sanitation” and respecting Indigenous decision-making in conservation efforts so that they have the flexibility to live harmoniously with the forest, he said.

Banner image: The Yánesha San Gerónimo community in the nearby province of Oxapampa, department of Pasco. Image by Guillermo Carlos Gómez via Wikimedia Commons.

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