Peru Amazon Cash Pilot Eases Hunger, Aids Forests

A small, no-strings income paid to Indigenous families in Peru's Amazon has delivered striking results for both people and forest. The Peru Amazon Cash Pilot gave regular cash transfers worth about two pounds a day to participants across three communities over two years, and researchers say hunger fell sharply while most participants took up greener practices. The trial, run by the climate charity Cool Earth and analysed by the University of Bath, is described as the first unconditional basic income trial run with an Indigenous Amazonian community.

The numbers behind the headline are unusually clear. The share of households unable to afford nutritious food fell from seventy-three per cent to twenty-six per cent over the two years, while the share that had to skip meals dropped from close to half to just over a fifth. The proportion of participants forced to leave home for outside labour fell from forty-three per cent to eighteen per cent, according to the University of Bath's Universal Basic Income Research Group, which analysed the results. Self-reported wellbeing scores more than doubled across the trial.

Cash with training attached

The money arrived as six periodic transfers, each worth roughly three hundred dollars at current exchange rates, under what researchers call a Cash Plus model. Alongside the cash, participants were offered voluntary training in financial education, Indigenous rights, governance and environmental conservation. Attendance was voluntary, yet most people took part, and researchers say the training appears particularly important to the environmental results, linking it to work such as replanting around springs, community planting, seed banks and fish farms.

The project was designed with local women's groups, and one participant leader, Ketty Marcelo, who chairs an Indigenous women-led nonprofit, said she had seen firsthand changes in the strengthening of the community fabric. The pilot was funded by Liberty Specialty Markets and the People's Postcode Lottery. For families, the money acted as a buffer: interviews repeatedly described it as reducing pressure for outside wage work and leaving more time for their own farming and shared projects.

What changed for the forest

Nearly nine in ten participants reported adopting environmentally beneficial practices, according to the Guardian's account of the findings and Only Good News Daily's coverage of the findings. Examples included group reforestation, restoring water sources, planting native trees such as cedar, mahogany and bamboo, and less burning of forest. More families shifted away from short-term survival work such as logging and invested in sustainable farming instead, and a share of households expanded farmland that had previously been abandoned, bringing old plots back into cultivation.

There is an honest caveat attached to those green results. The evaluation measured what people said they did, not satellite images of forest cover, and the authors say future studies need direct environmental measures. Other academics warn that cash transfers can drive deforestation if they fund farm expansion or vehicles, a risk the researchers acknowledge. The counterpoint matters: the pilot's case rests on behaviour change reported by participants, and the next test is whether independent measurement confirms it.

Why the model travels

The findings suggest that when communities have greater security and autonomy, they are better able to protect the ecosystems they depend on, co-author Nick Langridge said, as quoted by the Guardian. That idea cuts against the assumption that conservation must be bought with conditions and policing. If people under pressure clear forest to survive, easing that pressure may protect more trees than fences and fines alone, and the Peru Amazon Cash Pilot offers a concrete test of that logic in one of the world's most important biomes, as European cities test their own climate resilience plans.

The result also lands beside a bigger debate about paying for standing forest. The Netherlands has pledged hundreds of millions to a global fund that pays countries to keep tropical forests intact, a top-down version of the same idea. The Peru trial tests the bottom-up version: paying the people who live in the forest directly, without conditions, and trusting them to decide. More detail on the trial is available from The Fourth Plate's report on the pilot.