Disney’s Jungle Cruise

Over the past decade, Disney routed millions of dollars to the forest through Conservation International, a nonprofit in Arlington, Va. The money bolstered the cash-strapped Peruvian agency responsible for protecting the area and provided handouts to residents who cooperated. Once-rampant deforestation has slowed. But Disney money has also inflamed a long-standing conflict between the government, which claims the land as a national park, and thousands of people who live there.

Deforestation in the Alto Mayo

Conservation International generates credits based on the difference between actual tree loss and estimates of what would have happened without the initiative

Conservation International’s estimated tree loss without initiative

Acres

per year

Actual loss

6K

4

2

0

2001

2019

Conservation International’s estimated tree loss without initiative

Actual loss

Acres

per year

6K

4

2

0

2001

2019

Conservation International’s estimated

tree loss without initiative

Acres

per year

Actual loss

6K

4

2

0

The men at the table were from rondas campesinas, the village self-defense groups that hold sway in the forest and have organized most of the resistance. Fidel Mendoza, a rondero with a thin black mustache, has spent most of his life farming in the Alto Mayo. He came to the forest as a boy of 15, eking out a living while battling swarms of mosquitoes. People in the forest typically acquire their land by clearing a plot and putting it to use or, like Mendoza, buying informally from someone who did. It wasn’t until 2001, more than two decades after he arrived, that anyone told him the land belonged to the state. “You can’t be here,” Mendoza recalled a government official telling him.

“They showed up all high-handed,” said Feliciano Guevara, another rondero. “They’d come to a house, ‘This is my land, what are you doing here? You’re trespassing.’ And since then, they’ve treated us like trespassers.”

The government rarely followed through on eviction threats, but the ronderos said their troubles multiplied after the Disney money started flowing to the forest in 2009. More signs went up declaring the Alto Mayo property of the state. Sweeps by park rangers increased. Conservation International began recruiting settlers to take the government’s side, offering coffee seedlings and bags of fertilizer to anyone who pledged to stop clearing land. Some took the deal.

Others resisted, and the rangers and policemen who ventured into the woods sometimes ended up detained and beaten. Violent threats forced the head of Conservation International’s Alto Mayo operation to flee the area in 2018. (The official, who asked not to be named for security reasons, continues to oversee the project from elsewhere in Peru.)

Mendoza and the other ronderos said they had nothing to do with some of these acts. In other cases, they said using force was their lawful duty. They insisted they are the true stewards of the land and claimed, with little evidence, that the government plans to evict the settlers so it can turn over the forest to mining and oil concessions. The men were vaguely aware of Disney’s role in funding the operation, but they said they had no idea why.

“That is the big question,” said Jose Gilmer Vasquez, a young rondero whose nickname is Rambo. “That’s what we want to find out—what Disney’s angle is.”

When the Disney Dream launched in January 2011, it set a new standard for the company’s cruise fleet: room for 4,000 passengers and a crew of 1,458, more than a dozen restaurants, and the AquaDuck, a first-of-its-kind 765-foot “water coaster.” Each suite had three TVs, including one in the master bathroom, and three choices for pillows. Robert Iger, then Disney’s chief executive officer and now its executive chairman, oversaw the christening at Florida’s Port Canaveral. Hundreds of performers sang and danced, fireworks exploded, and singer Jennifer Hudson waved a wand to summon a helicopter dangling a 16-foot-tall bottle of Champagne. The Dream was instantly profitable, a success that helped bump up Iger’s bonus in 2012 to $16.5 million.

But for other executives back at headquarters in Burbank, Calif., the Dream was a problem. Iger had set a series of environmental goals for the company—reducing trash, conserving water, and cutting greenhouse gas emissions in half. He assigned a team to scour Disney’s global operations for improvements. Cinderella Castle replaced conventional lights with LEDs. Disneyland’s steam trains swapped in used cooking oil for fuel. Disney World plugged into a 22-acre solar farm shaped like Mickey Mouse. But the Imagineers couldn’t do much about the cruise business.

Even before the Dream hit the water, a study found that Disney’s two older, smaller ships accounted for about half the company’s direct carbon dioxide emissions. The Dream and the Fantasy, a sister ship launched a year later, came equipped with the latest energy-saving features and a special hull coating to reduce drag. But given their larger size, the new vessels would still burn more fuel than the old ones. Rather than falling, Disney’s emissions were about to soar.

Meeting Iger’s goal called for something more drastic than changing lightbulbs. So in 2009, shortly after the Alto Mayo project began, Disney committed $1 million to help it scale up. Over the following decade, carbon credits bought from the Peruvian rainforest would allow the company to report steady progress on a series of climate goals. Corporate offset buyers have provided most of the $30 million raised so far for the Alto Mayo. Disney bought more than half of those offsets, with smaller amounts going to companies including United Airlines, Microsoft, and mining giant BHP Group. Credits from the Alto Mayo help Gucci manage its carbon footprint, and the rock band Pearl Jam has used them to offset emissions generated on tour.

Rainforests store billions of tons of carbon dioxide in trunks, roots, and soil, like a sponge sopping up water. As farmers and loggers clear the jungle, they’re wringing out the sponge and sending carbon into the air to circulate for decades. Protecting these habitats—leaving the sponge full—is one of the most effective ways to slow global warming.

Corporations and environmental groups came up with the idea of creating a private, voluntary market to fund this kind of work in the late 1990s. Sponsors, often large U.S. or European companies, would finance the conservation of rainforests and, in exchange, get credits that theoretically cancel out corporate emissions. By 2018, some 51 million metric tons of offsets from land conservation were changing hands. As the world’s consumers awaken to the risks of climate change, interest is rising. If you’ve ever paid to offset the impact of a plane ticket, your money might have gone into a rainforest.

Offsets are a revenue opportunity for environmental groups such as Conservation International, which has been protecting critical habitats since 1987 and now operates in 70 countries. Rather than just asking for charitable donations, these days the nonprofit can fund some of its work by selling its corporate partners something valuable.

Forest offsets have their detractors. Measuring a project’s true carbon impact is always a matter of guesswork. Sponsors must estimate how much deforestation would take place if they didn’t do anything to stop it. If their tree-saving work outperforms that baseline, the difference becomes a carbon credit. Real-world climate impact hinges on the accuracy of a made-up scenario.

Critics also warn that offsets can backfire. Perversely, polluters might treat them as a moral license to burn more fossil fuel, the way a medieval lord might buy indulgences from the Catholic Church. (Conservation International points to research showing offset buyers are more likely than others to cut their own emissions.)

But some environmentalists embrace the projects. After all, companies such as Disney are for the most part free to emit as much carbon as they like. The U.S. doesn’t comprehensively regulate emissions and is withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, the global pact to limit warming. Voluntary efforts with uncertain results, proponents argue, are better than none at all.

Carbon credits also attract corporate money to projects that are worthy for other reasons. The Alto Mayo is a priceless store of biodiversity: Bird-watchers there set what was a world record in 2014 when they spotted 354 distinct species in a single day.

Although the forest offset market is mostly unregulated, the more reputable projects adhere to formal standards and ask an independent auditor to sign off on the authenticity of the carbon credits they produce. The Alto Mayo does both, and the premium prices offsets here fetch—$7 or $8 for a ton of carbon, about twice the 2018 average for similar deals—reflect the view that the project follows the best industry practices.

“We are committed to reducing our net greenhouse gas emissions through a mix of investments in sustainable design innovations, energy efficiencies, low-carbon fuel sources, renewable electricity, and natural climate solutions,” Disney said in a statement. “We specifically invest in projects like Alto Mayo that can deliver environmental benefits through measurable and verified carbon reductions, and we’re proud to have partnered with Conservation International for more than a decade and to have helped advance the project to a place that it has attracted the support of other major corporations while providing economic and social benefits to the local communities.”

Disney and Conservation International churn out slickly produced videos and Facebook posts showing pristine forests, smiling farmers, and eye-popping statistics about the millions of tons of carbon sequestered. Disney even buys coffee from the farmers and brews it at its theme parks. A cup made from Alto Mayo beans costs $3.39 at a snack stand near Disney World’s Space Mountain. If ever an offset project were a win-win-win—delivering benefits to the environment, local inhabitants, and the corporate sponsor—this ought to be it.

Fidel Mendoza, the mustached rondero, was among the first settlers in the Alto Mayo. Arriving in 1977, he found an almost untouched wilderness between the high, rocky Andes and the sweltering Amazon. Recognizing the importance of the rivers that originate there, Peru declared the rainforest a protected area in 1987, making it off-limits to farming and human habitation. But for more than a decade there wasn’t a single park ranger patrolling the area, which is more than twice the size of New York City. And thanks to a national highway that bisected the park, migrants streamed in by the thousands.

Most of the settlers, like Mendoza, came from cattle-grazing regions to the west, where the tradition of the rondas campesinas is strong. Members of this rural neighborhood watch are chosen by each village and traditionally armed with wooden sticks. Once concerned primarily with fending off cattle rustlers, the informal groups gained legal recognition—and better weapons—in the 1980s and 1990s, when the national government cultivated them as allies against Maoist guerrillas. The settlers brought these ronda traditions with them to the Alto Mayo. The patrols claim overlapping authority with the police and the judicial system, and they emphasize swift justice that often involves corporal punishment or humiliation. A boy caught stealing a cow might find himself surrounded by a crowd of his neighbors in the town plaza as ronderos in colored vests hang a sign describing his crime around his neck.

Earning a living in the Alto Mayo typically meant clearing a plot for coffee, farming it for a few years until the soil was spent, and then turning it to pasture while moving on to clear another plot. By 2009, when Disney began funding the conservation initiative, more than 1,500 acres a year were falling to logging and farming. The Alto Mayo had become one of the most threatened areas of protected forest in Peru.

Backed by millions of dollars of Disney money, Conservation International entered a partnership with the government agency responsible for the Alto Mayo, Servicio Nacional de Areas Naturales Protegidas por el Estado, or Sernanp. This turned a U.S. nonprofit into the official co-manager of a national park in Peru. The money allowed Sernanp to hire dozens of staff and equip them with trucks and motorcycles, exerting real control over its territory for the first time.

But Conservation International’s central goal was to change the settlers’ farming practices. It recruited hundreds to sign agreements with Sernanp, promising to stop clearing the land. In exchange, they got fertilizer and training to farm in a more sustainable way. Rather than clear-cutting plantations and abandoning them every few years, the settlers were encouraged to stay in one place and replenish the soil with bird guano. The group helped finance a co-op to sell coffee beans certified as organic and fair trade, fetching higher prices.

About 600 families, accounting for almost half the residents of the park, are part of the program. By last year, they were growing enough sustainable coffee to fill 13 shipping containers. With the nonprofit’s encouragement, some have diversified into other crops that aren’t land-intensive, such as dragon fruit and native honey.

Norbil Becerra is one of the Disney-backed program’s model citizens. An ambitious man whose quick smile shows off two silver teeth, he migrated to the Alto Mayo in the late 1990s, first growing coffee and raising cattle, and later working as a carpenter and illegal logger. Now, with Conservation International’s help, he runs a bird sanctuary near the edge of the forest. Although bird-watchers often passed through Becerra’s village in winter months, locals ignored them, assuming they were mining prospectors. But after meeting some birders through the conservation group, Becerra spent months experimenting with feeders.

His little preserve now attracts a few hundred birders a year, and he said someday he’d like to earn enough from tourism that he wouldn’t have to supplement his income with odd jobs. “Instead of chopping down and clearing the last of our forests, you can do this sort of work,” Becerra said, leading visitors to a clearing in the woods where hummingbirds from a dozen extravagantly colored species were feeding. “And it’s a better way to live.”

At first, Becerra’s cooperation made him a target for those who oppose conservation efforts. When he and a few neighbors cut deals with Sernanp in 2013, they were threatened with beatings. Some caved to the pressure. For several years, Becerra said, few in the neighborhood would hire him for work. That changed more recently, when his birders began spending money at local shops.

As Sernanp began to assert its power, some ronderos served as the voice of local resistance. Although settlers rarely faced eviction, the lack of land title led to constant squabbles with Sernanp over electrification, trail construction, and the location of schools. To the ronderos, settlers who signed agreements with the agency would only strengthen its hand.

Some ronda leaders started demanding that employees of the parks agency ask permission to visit parts of the forest. That led to confrontations. In August 2016, settlers carrying sticks, whips, and lengths of chain waylaid about a dozen people from Sernanp deep in the forest, marched them to the highway, and flogged them. A month later, a larger group ventured into the forest, this time escorted by more than a dozen police officers. They met a similar fate.

A video of the second encounter shows men being forced to walk barefoot along a muddy trail while settler women shout and poke them with sticks. “The way the rondas work is that first the women ronderas start beating you,” said Ivonne Paico, who led the earlier expedition and is now Sernanp’s area chief. “The men are always behind.”

The detention and flogging of policemen won the Alto Mayo rare notice in the national media, and the government began to close ranks with Sernanp. In 2018, almost a decade into Disney’s patronage of the forest, Peru’s cabinet chief toured the area and pledged to restore the government’s authority there. An army base nearby was repurposed to service the police helicopters that now buzz in and out of the forest.

Last June, after the ronderos laid boulders across the highway, choking off traffic to the region for four days, they were dispersed by hundreds of black-clad riot policemen firing tear-gas canisters. In December, the police opened a base deep in the park’s interior. It’s one of the most environmentally sensitive areas, and deforestation is still rampant. The head of Sernanp flew in from Lima for the occasion, reviewing ranks of men in camouflage fatigues armed with rifles. The outpost “will not only focus on the removal of people,” he declared, “but also provide them with sustainable alternatives such as tourism.”

Conservation International estimates that deforestation in the Alto Mayo has slowed by half, a more dramatic reduction than in the surrounding area. The millions spent on bags of fertilizer and ranger patrols—helped along by government security forces—are keeping more than 500,000 tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere each year, the nonprofit said. That’s the equivalent of taking more than 100,000 cars off the road.

“Without Conservation International,” said Segundo Calle, an environmental advocate who lived near the park for several decades, “we wouldn’t have started, and we wouldn’t have what we have now.”

Disney’s climate efforts have won notice over the past decade. The executive who spearheaded the Alto Mayo project was honored with the National Audubon Society’s Rachel Carson Award. The company finished at the top of a corporate social responsibility ranking. A New York Times headline declared, “The Magic Kingdom Is Going Green.”

The fine print in Disney’s annual environmental reports tells a more complicated story. Progress in recent years, as the cruise ship business has sent carbon emissions soaring, comes almost entirely from offsets. The Alto Mayo credits, in turn, rely on unverifiable estimates of forest destruction that would have happened without Disney and other corporate patrons. Conservation International projected a rate of deforestation without intervention averaging about 5,000 acres a year over a decade—more than triple the already blistering pace set in the mid-2000s.

Of course, the more dire the prediction, the more money rolls in. Even if deforestation had actually doubled over the course of the project, the Alto Mayo still might have generated credits worth millions of dollars a year to its corporate partners. Conservation International said it arrived at its estimate using techniques prescribed by the industry’s top standard-setting organization, and the result was validated by an outside auditor. “We don’t develop the methodologies. We just follow them,” said Agustin Silvani, a Conservation International executive. “There’s a bit of a tipping point, and at some point deforestation really takes off. We’ve seen that lots of other places.”

Much depends on baselines in the murky math of climate goals. In March, for example, Disney executives claimed success in cutting the company’s emissions by 47%, putting the company on track to achieve a long-term goal of slashing its carbon footprint in half by the end of this year. The math ought to be straightforward: Take the company’s carbon footprint in 2019—the air conditioning at Epcot Center, the exhaust from corporate Gulfstream jets, the cruise fleet, everything—and compare it with emissions from 2012.

But a review of Disney’s reports shows that the impressive number relied on a subtle bit of misdirection. Disney included the impact of Alto Mayo and other carbon offsets when it calculated its 2019 emissions but left them out of the 2012 calculation. It’s a little like a dieter claiming to lose 10 pounds in a week, without mentioning that during his first weigh-in he had several pounds of rocks in his pockets.

Disney’s choice to adjust the emissions formulas between its first and second weigh-ins isn’t stated explicitly in the March report. Without the weight of the rocks in its pockets, Disney’s actual net emissions fell only 29%.

Disney's Greenhouse-Gas Math

Alto Mayo credits offset rising emissions from cruise ships

Metric tons of

Alto Mayo offsets

CO2 equivalent

Other offsets

2.0M

Other adjustments

Emissions

1.5

Net emissions

1.0

0.5

0

2006

2019

Alto Mayo offsets

Metric tons of

CO2 equivalent

Other offsets

2.0M

Other adjustments

Emissions

1.5

1.0

Net emissions

0.5

0

2006

2019

Alto Mayo offsets

Other offsets

Emissions

Other adjustments

Net emissions

0

There are no binding rules in the U.S. for how companies report their emissions, and they’re free to define progress however they want. Disney started its program earlier and discloses more data than most peers; outside groups such as Ceres, a nonprofit that advocates for sustainable investing, generally give the company’s climate program high marks. If even a model citizen such as Disney is using accounting magic to promote its achievements, it doesn’t inspire confidence in what the rest of corporate America is doing.

In the Alto Mayo, meanwhile, the ronderos’ account deserves skepticism, too. They claimed to be speaking for poor farmers who want to make a living and win title to their land. But their actions also benefit illegal commercial loggers. The ronderos we met had little to back up their conviction that Peru’s government has a secret plan to clear the park and hand it over to developers. To assume, as the ronderos do, that all outsiders want to exploit the Alto Mayo is to mistake a vanload of birders for gold prospectors.

Still, the ronderos might be on to something. The black smoke that until recently rose from the stacks of the Disney Dream attests to the pollution pumped out in the name of ever-greater consumption. And the Alto Mayo has become part of the system that maintains that consumption, allowing the pollution to continue unabated even as graphs in Disney’s annual reports show net emissions moving steadily downward.

It’s an awkward fact at the heart of much of the world’s climate policy: The U.S. and other rich countries are responsible for an outsize portion of the pollution, and they outsource some of the cleanup to poorer, faraway places. That means channeling money and resources into communities with their own intricate history and conflicts, often with unpredictable results.

Conservation International officials called the Alto Mayo project an unalloyed success. Their idea of cutting deals with locals has prevented a wider conflict, they said, describing the resisting ronderos as a disgruntled minority. “These are complex areas, you know?” said Claudio Schneider, a Conservation International official in Lima. “Most of the people are in favor of the project, and I think we have reached a critical mass.”

But carbon spewing from the tailpipe of a Disneyland shuttle bus is guaranteed to float in the atmosphere for decades. The logic of offsetting requires a certain number of trees in the Alto Mayo to remain standing for just as long. If progress in the Alto Mayo reverses—even 20 or 30 years from now—the whole equation gets thrown out of whack.

Thousands of miles away, the Disney Dream has weathered the coronavirus outbreak at Port Canaveral and in the Bahamas. All of the company’s cruise ships are out of service, and most theme parks remain closed. In these reduced circumstances, Disney’s 2020 emissions targets will be even easier to hit, needing fewer offsets purchased in the jungles of Peru.

Disney executives anticipate a robust recovery whenever it’s safe to cruise again. The shipyard that built the Dream is at work on three additions to the fleet. The first of these, expected to sail in 2022, will feature a three-deck staircase descending around an immense chandelier and less-polluting engines powered by liquefied natural gas. But it may force Disney to lean even harder on tree projects in pursuit of the dream of carbon neutrality. The Wish will be its biggest cruise ship yet.