In the Sierra Gorda of Querétaro, a great change has taken place. Its people now look at the forest the way others look at a bank. Not because they are greedy, but because for the first time in their lives, the forest their grandparents watched grow and die in silence now provides them with an income and a future. It gives them pride.
For decades, the question that echoed through the 638 communities of this prodigious mountain range was always the same: what is the point of having so much forest if it doesn’t give us anything? It’s an honest question. The forests are beautiful and necessary, yes—but this doesn’t pay the bills, doesn’t send the children to school, doesn’t fix the leaky roof during the rainy season. More is needed for conservation to be viable and attractive to the communities of the Sierra Gorda.
That’s why we created Carbono Biodiverso: a carbon offsetting program that offers a different vision of what conservation in Mexico can be. It’s a model that asks us to care for nature not by decree or out of guilt, but because it’s in our best interest. Because taking care of nature and forests is right and, deep down, it’s taking care of ourselves.
The Carbono Biodiverso model is elegant in its simplicity. Companies in Querétaro that emit carbon have to offset their emissions. The forest owners of the Sierra Gorda—more than 174 forest owners, mostly small private landowners, since 70% of these sacred lands are individually owned, in addition to several ejidos (communal landholdings), which together own the remaining 30%—receive payment for something they already know how to do: care for their forests, prevent livestock from destroying them, and allow the trees to compete for light, water, and nutrients and grow, and in that growth, capture the carbon that the world doesn’t know what to do with.
Since its launch in 2021, Carbono Biodiverso has led to the regeneration of more than 40,000 hectares and has captured 438,242 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. Not with massive reforestation efforts that often fail, but by trusting in the intelligence of nature itself. The strategy is to allow nature to regenerate on its own. The trees know what they’re doing. They always have. They just needed us to let them take over.
But this model wouldn’t work without a solid foundation of public policy. That foundation has been built by the Secretariat of Sustainable Development of Querétaro, SEDESU, through a fiscal tool known as the Sello Querétaro. This policy requires industries in the state to pay for their carbon emissions, but it also opens a door for them: they can offset part of that debt by purchasing carbon credits generated by certified forestry projects within the state itself. It’s a policy that closes the loop. That ensures carbon money stays at home, in the mountains, in the hands of those who care for the forest.
Isn’t this, perhaps, what we’ve always called Mexican humanism? Not the humanism of speeches and podiums, but the humanism of the people, the one that walks among the trees and asks, “How are you? How are you doing? What do you need?” Humanism that puts people at the center—the small landowner in Querétaro, the mountain family, the ejido members—and a meaningful economy around them. An economy that doesn’t destroy to grow, but grows because it doesn’t destroy.
Roberto Pedraza, our technical manager for biodiversity and monitoring, puts it in words that deserve to be repeated: “Landowners now see the forests as capital and income. That completely changes their relationship with the forest, because the landowners become their guardians.” Guardians. Not victims of neglect nor dependent on the charity of others. Active, enthusiastic guardians, proud of what they have and what they do.
The goal of the model, as Ricardo Torres, Undersecretary of the Environment for SEDESU in Querétaro, says, is for all the small landowners in the Sierra Gorda to be part of it and fall in love with it. For the entire Sierra Gorda to become a vast territory where conservation is more profitable than destruction, where a standing tree is worth more than a felled one.
Unlike so many international carbon markets that have failed to adequately benefit communities in the Global South for tons of carbon captured, Carbono Biodiverso seeks fair, local, and verifiable payments. It seeks to ensure that the money from the forest stays in the forest. It aims to empower the people of the mountains to make a living by caring for their land.
This is transformative. This is revolutionary, even if it doesn’t sound like revolution. It sounds more like common sense; the deep and patient common sense of a Mexico that has always known that the land is not a resource to be exploited but a heritage to be protected.
