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Indigenous carbon property rights
by Professor John Sheehan, Deputy Director, Asia-Pacific Centre for Complex Real Property Rights and Adjunct Professor, Faculty of Design Architecture and Building at University of Technology, Sydney
The commodification of forests to permit carbon sequestration and hence trading in the resultant carbon rights is examined as an emerging dispossession of customary and traditional owners’ rights and interests arising from the survival of native title. Indigenous property rights in biota are an important incident of native title, and the disregard of such ownership by national states when creating freestanding legal rights to carbon raises the twin issues of extinguishment, and liability for compensation.