Carbon credit generated in India has traded on voluntary markets for as little as $2.35 a tonne | Photo Credit: WANAN YOSSINGKUM

Here is a fact that should ruin your World Environment Day.

A tonne of carbon dioxide is a tonne of carbon dioxide. The molecule does not have a passport. It does not know whether the tree that absorbed it grew in Karnataka or Bavaria. And yet a carbon credit generated in India has traded on voluntary markets for as little as $2.35 a tonne, while a tonne in the European compliance system now sits around €72. Yes, these are different markets, and yes, part of that gap is quality and regulation. But not thirty times. A gap that wide is not a market. It is a verdict on who gets to set the price, and it is not us.

We have managed to turn the air above India into one of the cheapest commodities on earth, and then we throw a tree-planting ceremony to celebrate our environmental commitment. It is the economic equivalent of giving away your house and posting a photo of the doormat.

Let me put the absurdity in one sentence. India grows the carbon, sells it for the price of a bus ticket, and is now about to be taxed by Europe for the carbon embedded in the steel, cement, and aluminium we export there, at the European price. Brussels set its first official border carbon price this April at €75.36 a tonne. We sell our nature cheap and we will buy back the right to trade with Europe dear, and we have somehow convinced ourselves this is what playing the global game looks like.

The reason is almost funny once you see it. India’s national accounts cannot see a forest. A standing forest, full of carbon and water and pollinators, is worth precisely zero rupees in the way we measure the economy. The same forest, cut down and sold as timber, suddenly becomes GDP. Our accounting can only register nature at the moment we kill it. We have built a system that rewards the funeral and ignores the life.

This is not because Indians do not care about nature. It is because nobody has been paid to. A thing worth nothing gets treated like nothing. Now, the objection writes itself, and I have heard it at every dinner table. Putting a price on nature is the first step to selling it off. Markets will financialise the forest and then strip it bare.

But the forest is being stripped bare right now, today, at a price of zero. Pricelessness did not save it. And let me concede the hard part before you raise it: done badly, nature markets produce garbage. That fraud is itself a product of bad measurement and absent standards. The answer to a rigged market is not no market. It is a better one, with our hand on the ruler.

Put a real, ownable, tradable price on a living forest and, for the first time, the person who controls that land earns more by keeping it alive than by killing it. The whole question is who that person is. Get this wrong and nature markets become one more machine for taking land from Adivasi and forest communities and handing the upside to capital. We have done that before, in the name of dams, mines, and progress, and we should be ashamed of it. So the design is not a detail.

The value of a standing forest has to flow first to the people who have kept it standing, often for centuries, usually with no title to show for it. A nature market that dispossesses them is not a better idea than no market. The Forest Rights Act exists for a reason. Any honest system here begins there, not in a trading terminal.

India built UPI, Aadhaar and world class financial infrastructure. We have, finally, begun on nature too: a carbon market is being stood up, methodologies are being written, natural-capital accounting is being piloted. Good. For the single largest endowment we possess, we are still sending the raw value abroad to be measured, certified, and priced by someone else, and accepting what they pay. We did this with cotton under the British. We are half-doing it again, and this time it is the sky.

The solution is an Indian registry for natural capital, backed by the state but open to private rigour. Standards written here, for Indian conditions, with measurement good enough that no foreign buyer can dismiss our credits as junk — a regulator, sitting alongside the work SEBI and the RBI already do on capital, that treats an ecosystem with the seriousness it treats a balance sheet.

The writer is the founder and CEO of a SoulForest, nature capital company building Nature Economic Zones in India

Published on June 6, 2026