098 | The Case of the Tangled Titles: Unraveling the Legal Complexities of Land Ownership in the Amazon

Today we’re going to try and help you understand one of the most vexing components of the climate challenge — namely, the overlapping, interlinking, and contradictory land titles that determine control of so many tropical forests — in this case, the Amazon, the lungs of the planet.

 With no clarity over control and no realistic way of enforcing it, there’s no way to sustainably manage and protect this massive bulwark against climate change.

Today’s episode centers around a few individuals, most notably a Japan-born physician named Jonas Morioka, who migrated to Brazil in the 1980s, purchased timberland in the 1990s, pivoted to conservation in the 2000s, and is now embroiled in a title fight over a transaction that may or may not have taken place a century ago.

His story is far from unique, and it shows how easy it is to chop the forest, how difficult it is to save it, and how tenure disputes make it even more difficult to leverage carbon finance for the common good.

My guests are Vinny Maffei and Olivier LeJune of Quantum Commodity Intelligence. We collaborated in a recent story they ran called “How a decree created a REDD old mess in Brazil, and the new effort to fix it,” which you can read here:

https://www.qcintel.com/carbon/article/long-read-how-a-decree-created-a-redd-old-mess-in-brazil-and-the-new-effort-to-fix-it-23409.html