Is Guyana’s LCDS facing a reputational threat?

Apr 20, 2026 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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(Kaieteur News) – Guyana’s Low Carbon Development Strategy (LCDS) has been internationally praised as an attempt to convert natural capital into financial capital without cutting down forests. The country’s vast tropical rainforest, covering more than 85% of national territory, functions as a major carbon sink, meaning it absorbs and stores atmospheric carbon dioxide in biomass, soils and vegetation.

That ecological function has already generated billions of Guyana dollars in revenues through carbon-credit transactions and forest-climate partnerships. In essence, Guyana has been compensated for keeping its forests standing rather than converting them into timber, agriculture or mining lands.

Now the policy conversation is widening. Guyana is seeking to monetise not only carbon services, but also ecosystem services, biodiversity services, watershed services and eco-tourism related services.

On paper, this sounds like a sophisticated diversification of environmental revenue streams. In practice, however, it raises a difficult issue in environmental economics: are we valuing separate services, or charging multiple times for the same underlying asset?

To understand the debate, it is useful to define the technical terms.

Carbon services refer to the climate-regulation function of forests. Trees capture carbon dioxide through photosynthesis and store it in trunks, roots and soils. By preventing deforestation and degradation, Guyana can claim “avoided emissions” and carbon sequestration benefits. These can be quantified in tonnes of CO2 equivalent and sold as carbon credits in compliance or voluntary markets.

Ecosystem services is a broader umbrella concept. It includes provisioning services (timber, water, food), regulating services (flood control, climate moderation), supporting services (soil formation, nutrient cycling) and cultural services (recreation, spiritual value).

Carbon storage is therefore already one subset of ecosystem services. Carbon storage falls under what environmental economists call regulating services—the natural processes through which ecosystems help stabilise environmental conditions. Forests absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through photosynthesis and store that carbon in trees, vegetation and soils, thereby helping to regulate the global climate and reduce greenhouse gas concentrations. In this sense, carbon storage is not a separate category from ecosystem services, but one important component within the broader ecosystem-services framework.

Biodiversity services relate to the economic and scientific value generated by species richness, genetic resources and habitat preservation. These may include pharmaceutical discovery, pollination, ecological resilience and conservation finance tied to species protection.

Watershed services refer to hydrological functions performed by forests: water filtration, aquifer recharge, sediment retention, river flow regulation and flood mitigation. Standing forests stabilize catchments and reduce downstream treatment costs or infrastructure damage.

Eco-tourism services capture recreational and experiential value. Intact forests attract birdwatchers, researchers, adventure tourists and visitors seeking pristine nature. These services monetize scenery, wildlife and cultural heritage.

At first glance, these appear to be distinct markets. A tonne of carbon is not the same as a bird species, and neither is identical to clean river flow or a tourism excursion. Yet from a national accounting standpoint, they frequently originate from the same standing forests. The same hectare of rainforest that stores carbon also houses biodiversity, protects watersheds and attracts tourists.

That is where the problem of stacking claims emerges.

In environmental finance, there is a difference between “bundling” multiple genuinely separable outputs and “double counting” the same ecological asset under different labels. If Guyana receives payment for preserving a forest because it stores carbon, and then seeks additional large-scale compensation internationally because the same preserved forest also regulates water, conserves biodiversity and provides scenic value, critics may argue that the country is attempting to monetize overlapping benefits without clear additionality.

Additionality is a technical term meaning the benefit paid for must be incremental—something above and beyond what was already compensated. If carbon-credit buyers paid Guyana specifically to keep forests intact, then many co-benefits such as biodiversity conservation and watershed protection were already embedded in that avoided deforestation outcome. Once the forest remains standing, all those ancillary services continue automatically.

International funders and carbon-market participants may therefore ask: why should Guyana be paid twice for the same conservation act?

This concern is not academic. Carbon markets already struggle with issues of permanence, leakage, baselines and verification. Introducing parallel claims for ecosystem, biodiversity and watershed monetization over the same forests could create reputational risk. Buyers may fear that one hectare is being sold repeatedly to multiple constituencies. Climate finance institutions, multilateral donors and private investors increasingly demand rigorous Measurement, Reporting and Verification (MRV) systems to avoid precisely this kind of overlap.

If confidence weakens, Guyana’s LCDS could face credibility headwinds. The strategy depends heavily on international trust that Guyana offers high-integrity environmental assets. If counterparties conclude that Guyana is “double-dipping”—first collecting carbon revenues and then seeking further rents from identical forest functions—they may discount future deals, tighten conditions or walk away altogether.

To be fair, Guyana does have a legitimate argument that forests produce multiple services and that global markets have historically undervalued them. A hectare of rainforest undeniably delivers more than carbon storage. But the challenge is not whether multiple benefits exist; it is whether separate payments can be justified without overlap in valuation methodology.

The prudent path for Guyana is therefore not indiscriminate monetisation of every label attached to forests. It is to develop a transparent natural-capital accounting framework that clearly distinguishes which services are already captured in carbon-credit pricing and which represent genuinely new, measurable and additional value streams. For example, site-specific eco-tourism revenues or downstream utility payments for watershed management may be easier to defend than sweeping new international claims layered atop existing carbon agreements. And for these site-specific eco-tourism revenues and utility payments for watershed management, you don’t need a Global Biodiversity Alliance.

Guyana’s forests are a treasure of global significance. But in finance, as in ecology, sustainability requires balance. If the country reaches too aggressively for multiple payments from the same standing forests, it risks undermining the very credibility that made the LCDS successful in the first place. Sometimes the danger is not underpricing an asset—but overplaying it.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.) 

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• LCDS, national territory, Peeping Tom, threat

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