In 2013, California launched its cap-and-trade program, a carbon credit market that allows companies and governments to engage with offset projects that incentivize investments in planting trees, preserving forests, or even supporting solar farms. The idea is to reduce or offset greenhouse gas emissions by purchasing credits for nature-based projects.

Initially, the Yurok Tribe expressed interest in joining the program. The market would provide additional revenue and would enable the Yurok to play an additional role in addressing climate change. But Frankie Myers, an environmental consultant for the tribe and former vice chairman, had doubts.

“This idea of ‘you can pay to pollute’ was something that I was very, very concerned about,” he said. “I was very concerned with how that lined up with our cultural values as a tribe.”

The Yurok Tribe’s carbon offset project in Northern California includes 7,600 acres of a tribally-managed forest: mature evergreen, fir, and redwood trees, ideal for carbon sequestration. When the Yurok joined the state’s program in 2014, private consultants and brokers oversaw the project due to the tribal nation’s limited funds, removing the tribe’s ability to manage the forest in a way that aligned with Yurok values. Four years later, revenue began to climb and the nation took over management. It was then that Myers began to see the benefits of a tribal-led carbon offset project. Since the Yurok Tribe joined the cap-and-trade program, at least 13 Indigenous nations in the U.S. have launched their own offset projects on California’s marketplace.

Originally, the program was slated to end this year. However, last week, California Governor Gavin Newsom extended the state’s cap-and-trade program until 2045. The “action comes as the Trump administration continues its efforts to gut decades-old, bipartisan American clean air protections and derail critical climate progress,” Newsom’s office said.

Before its offset project, the tribal economy for the Yurok Nation relied on discretionary funds from the federal government and gaming revenue, but Myers said that the tribe has now received tens of millions of dollars in carbon credit sales, boosting its economy and funding environmental projects like recovery work on the Klamath River in the wake of dam removal

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