A new lawsuit threatens to upend a landmark, four-decade-old revenue sharing pact that’s guided the distribution of more than $2 billion among Alaska’s Native corporations.
Sun shines through the canopy in the Tongass National Forest, which borders lands owned by the Juneau-based Alaska Native regional corporation Sealaska. Sealaska’s earnings from carbon credits are the subject of a new lawsuit.
The plaintiffs argue that the 1982 agreement, and a 1971 federal law — the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, or ANCSA — that underpins it, require 70% of those carbon credit revenues to be shared among the rest of the regional corporations. The pipeline project was stalled amid conflicting land claims by Indigenous groups that had not ceded their lands to the U.S. government. In response, under ANCSA,some 10% of the acreage in the state to the 12 newly formed, Native-owned regional corporations, as well as to more than 150 smaller village corporations.
That left ample room for interpretation, particularly about how companies could deduct their costs from those revenues. Lawsuits over the details proliferated. The problem, they add, is especially urgent given that carbon markets “stand to become increasingly robust and profitable as efforts to combat climate change take on increased political salience.”The roots of the current conflict date back to 2016, when Ahtna, Chugach and Sealaska — along with a few smaller village corporations, which aren’t required to share revenues — began developing their carbon credit projects.
The decision has not been released publicly. But in October, three of the original nine corporations that asked for arbitration — Bering Straits Native Corp., Calista and NANA — filed their subsequent appeal to the court system and included passages from the arbitrators’ ruling in their complaint.
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