A two-year pilot that gave Indigenous Peruvian villagers roughly $2 a day with no strings attached has contributed to protecting the Amazon rainforest, according to a University of Bath analysis of the program, adding fresh evidence to a growing debate over whether direct cash payments can be a cost-effective conservation tool.
The pilot, run by the UK charity Cool Earth, gave 211 people across three Asháninka communities in Peru's Amazon six cash transfers of 1,032 Peruvian soles each — equivalent to roughly £2, or about $2.30, a day — to spend however they chose. Researchers found that almost 90% of participants adopted environmentally beneficial practices over the course of the trial.
Can a basic income keep rainforests standing?
University of Bath, describing the research question behind the pilot
The analysis is expected to feed into a wider debate over 'basic income' approaches to conservation, which bet that giving communities unconditional cash reduces the economic pressure that pushes them toward illegal logging or other unsustainable use of forest resources — without requiring the kind of monitoring and enforcement that conditional payment-for-services schemes typically demand.
Cool Earth's own earlier reporting on the pilot found that, after roughly a year, the three communities were no longer engaging in unsustainable or illegal forest activities to make ends meet, though that internal assessment predated the independent academic analysis now underway. The University of Bath's involvement is intended to give the findings more credibility than an advocacy organization's self-reported results alone.
Researchers caution that a three-community, 211-person pilot cannot establish whether the approach would scale affordably across the much larger populations living in and around the Amazon, where illegal logging, mining and land clearing remain driven by a mix of economic desperation and organized criminal enterprise that modest cash transfers alone are unlikely to fully offset.