Human Carbon Credit
From green talk to fair income for the citizen

First-Person Consciousness — Brain Bee

“I breathe, therefore I emit. But why do only companies get paid for carbon?”

Before I was a “voter”, a “taxpayer”, or a “conscious consumer”, I was a single egg cell.

From the beginning, my life is metabolism: inhaling, exhaling, gas exchange, carbon going in and out. My body is a tiny carbon cycle inside larger cycles — family, city, forest, planet.

As a child, I didn’t know what “climate” was.
I just felt the heat of a treeless neighbourhood, the dust of a street without pavement, the water that sometimes didn’t come. My Damasian Mind was being formed from these tensions: no shade, no decent transport, no living public spaces.

In adolescence, the green discourse arrived:

• “eco” packaging;
  
  

• “carbon neutral” products;
  
  

• companies promising to be “net zero by 2040”.
  
  

But in practice I saw this:
the more I consumed the “green solution”, the more profit someone accumulated. And I still had no trees on my street, no safe cycle lanes, no reliable buses.

At the same time, I began to hear about:

• carbon markets, where companies buy and sell “rights to emit”;
  
  

• carbon credits generated in forests, often in Indigenous lands and traditional communities;
  
  

• the rising price of carbon worldwide, and fiscal revenues from carbon pricing surpassing 100 billion dollars in recent years.
  
  

In other words: there is a huge economy spinning on top of something I breathe and destroy without having chosen it. And still, I, as a citizen, receive almost nothing.

That is where my discomfort — and the concept of Human Carbon Credit — is born:

If the Brazilian State is JIWASA — a living collective body —
then each citizen is one cell of this body.
When I reduce emissions, protect territory, change habits,
I generate climate value.
Why doesn’t that value come back to me
as metabolic income, in Drex Citizen?

This blog is about exactly that:
how to move from green talk to a system where carbon becomes fair income for the citizen — without falling into greenwashing, without recolonising the Global South with “market solutions”, and without forgetting the central point: the citizen is the JIWASA State.

1. Carbon markets today: money rises, risk trickles down to citizens

Over the last years, carbon pricing instruments (carbon taxes, emission trading systems, credit mechanisms) have multiplied and now cover around a quarter of global emissions.

These systems:

• raise ever larger revenues (over 100 billion dollars a year recently);
  
  

• are promoted by international institutions as key tools for a “just transition”, on the condition that part of the money is used to protect the poorest.
  
  

At the same time, criticism has grown:

• Global South organisations show how many carbon-credit projects repeat colonial patterns — grabbing land, regulating forests from afar, expelling traditional uses and concentrating income;
  
  

• academic and activist analyses describe a “greenwashing of the Global South”, where carbon markets can mask the continuation of extraction and climate injustice.
  
  

In Brazil, recent legislation has advanced legal certainty for forest carbon credits in public concessions and opened the way for a regulated carbon market linked to national climate targets.

This matters. But notice:

• Who negotiates most of the credits? Large companies, funds, big forest projects.
  
  

• Who lives with climate risk — heat waves, floods, landslides, droughts? The ordinary citizen, especially the poor.
  
  

Today, carbon has a price, but those who live the risk do not receive the income.

2. From “carbon footprint” to Human Carbon Credit

Part of the recent literature works with the idea of Personal Carbon Allowances (PCA) — personal carbon budgets distributed to each citizen, monitored by digital systems, and adjusted to climate goals.

These proposals bring two important intuitions:

1. Climate justice begins at the person level, not only at the company level.
   
   

2. Current technology makes it possible to track energy use, transport, food and more, to the point of designing personalised limits and incentives.
   
   

I do not simply adopt the “personal carbon quota” model as a method to control behaviour.
What I am proposing is something different:

Human Carbon Credit is the legal recognition that
the citizen, as a body that feels (interoception), moves (proprioception)
and decides (Damasian Mind), generates climate value when:

• they reduce emissions by choice or constraint;
  
  

• they protect biomes and territories;
  
  

• they live in denser cities, with fewer cars and more public transport;
  
  

• they consume fewer high–carbon footprint products.
  
  

That value should be:

• measured (with transparent, simple, auditable metrics);
  
  

• converted into climate credits;
  
  

• distributed back as daily metabolic income, via Drex Citizen.
  
  

This is not ecological “air miles”.
It is a new layer of climate and economic justice, aligned with Article 225 of the Constitution, which guarantees the right to an ecologically balanced environment and imposes on the State and the community the duty to defend it for present and future generations.

3. Metabolic design: how would Human Carbon Credit work?

In JIWASA language, I see four layers:

3.1. Physical layer – the body–carbon relation

Every citizen has a minimum carbon metabolism (to breathe, live, move). On top of that, there is carbon that results from system design (bad urban planning, lack of public transport, food that only arrives through long fossil chains).

The first is inevitable.
The second is political.

Human Carbon Credit does not pay for inevitable carbon.
It remunerates the collective effort to reduce emissions and the cost of living in poorly planned systems, shifting part of the climate value back to those who feel the heat, the flood, the drought in their own body.

3.2. Data layer – mapping everyday emissions

Here technology enters:

• household energy data;
  
  

• transport data (bus and metro ticketing, cycling infrastructure use);
  
  

• some consumption indicators, where appropriate;
  
  

• climate–risk maps (floods, landslides, heat islands).
  
  

Many recent reports already argue that carbon pricing in emerging economies can mobilise substantial resources for climate justice and development, if paired with robust redistributive policies.

My proposal is:

• not to use these data for surveillance or punishment;
  
  

• but to calculate how much each region and citizen profile contributes to mitigation, and how much each one is exposed to climate risks.
  
  

3.3. Financial layer – from market logic to metabolic logic

Today, revenues from carbon pricing are largely used for general budgets, infrastructure and some social or environmental programmes.

What I propose is that a mandatory share of these revenues be channelled to a National Human Carbon Credit Fund with three functions:

1. Daily Drex income (a climate layer of Drex Citizen), complementing the metabolic income right proposed in Blog 7.
   
   

2. Investment in local adaptation (neighbourhoods more exposed to climate events receive more resources for drainage, trees, decent housing).
   
   

3. Support for just transition in labour (for example, supporting workers and regions that move away from carbon–intensive activities).
   
   

3.4. Political layer – from abstract green to green with a personal ID

This architecture only makes sense if:

• the citizen knows how much carbon is being priced in their name;
  
  

• they have the right to see how much of that climate value returns to their Drex account;
  
  

• there is social oversight over who is appropriating the green narrative and for whose benefit.
  
  

This is where the concept of Human Carbon Credit changes cognition:

Carbon stops being just “something technical” negotiated between companies and regulators
and becomes a dimension of my income, my vote, and my dignity.

4. From greenwashing to fair income

A significant part of the recent literature and activism has denounced:

• the exploitation of the Global South through carbon markets that export responsibility and import poorly designed “solutions”;
  
  

• the colonial legacy in these markets, where land, forests and bodies are still treated as “carbon sinks” to sustain high–emission lifestyles in the Global North.
  
  

Bishops’ conferences, social movements and Indigenous leaders have labelled this model “false solutions”, in which green profit matters more than climate justice.

The Human Carbon Credit I propose is an answer to that deadlock:

• It does not reject carbon pricing altogether — pricing can be a powerful tool.
  
  

• But it demands that a meaningful share of climate value be returned directly to people, especially the most vulnerable, as metabolic income and adaptation infrastructure.
  
  

Instead of “the market will save the climate”,
the design becomes: JIWASA regulates the market to save lives and redistribute power.

5. Constitution, metabolism and the JIWASA Citizen

The 1988 Constitution, in Article 225, states that:

Everyone has the right to an ecologically balanced environment, a common good of the people and essential to a healthy quality of life, and the Public Authorities and the community have the duty to defend and preserve it for present and future generations.

In my vocabulary:

• the balanced environment is the State’s APUS — the great body–territory we all breathe within;
  
  

• environmental protection is not optional, it is a metabolic mandate: without environment there is no body, no mind, no economy;
  
  

• the “community” mentioned in this article is exactly JIWASA — the collective pronoun I borrow from Aymara experience to bring into our political language.
  
  

The Human Carbon Credit is then a way to make this article real:

• at the individual level, with Drex income;
  
  

• at the territorial level, with adaptation investments;
  
  

• at the mental level, shifting blind faith in green consumption towards a faith with evidence: the understanding that money is energy of the social body, and should circulate in favour of those who sustain it with their metabolism and their vulnerability.
  
  

6. Future Memory: who do I want to be as a climate citizen?

When I, Brain Bee, look at my trajectory — from egg cell to digital city, from breathing to voting — I ask:

Do I want to be just a green consumer,
or a JIWASA Citizen who receives, in Drex,
the share of climate value I help create and protect?

The concept of Human Carbon Credit is, at its core, an exercise in Future Memory:

• remembering that every decision today shapes tomorrow’s social physiology;
  
  

• remembering that Article 225 is not poetic decoration, but a design instruction;
  
  

• remembering that without climate metabolic income, we will remain trapped in greenwashing and in the concentration of power and wealth.
  
  

In my JIWASA State project,
carbon is not just a number in a global spreadsheet.

It is:

• life story;
  
  

• fair income;
  
  

• and a criterion of intergenerational justice, where children who are not yet born are already recognised as co-owners of this vast metabolism called Brazil.
  
  

Post-2020 References

(Carbon credits, climate justice and climate income)

1. World Bank – State and Trends of Carbon Pricing 2024–2025.
   
   

2. IMF – Ian Parry, “Five Things to Know about Carbon Pricing”, Finance & Development, 2021.
   
   

3. Vera Songwe – “Carbon pricing: An integral part of a just transition”, UN policy essays, 2023.
   
   

4. UNEP Finance Initiative – Governmental Carbon Pricing: Driving a Just Transition, 2022.
   
   

5. Todd, J. – “Carbon Pricing for a Just Transition”, Colorado Law Review, 2024.
   
   

6. Fuso Nerini, F. et al. – “Personal Carbon Allowances Revisited”, Nature Sustainability, 2021.
   
   

7. Fawcett, T.; Parag, Y. – “An Introduction to Personal Carbon Allowances”, 2021.
   
   

8. Climate Leadership Council and Resources for the Future – analyses of the Carbon Dividends Plan, 2021–2024.
   
   

9. Carbon Market Watch – Carbon Markets and the Global South: Opportunity or Exploitation?, 2025.
   
   

10. Irawan, A. K. P. – Greenwashing the Global South: Carbon Markets and the Legacy of Colonial Extraction, 2025.
    
    

11. Coolsaet, B. et al. (eds.) – Climate Justice in the Global South, 2025.
    
    

12. Friends of the Earth International – Opposing Carbon Markets: A Climate Justice Guide, 2023.