Querétaro's forest carbon scheme counted 400 beneficiaries in 2025, Semarnat says after Sierra Gorda visit

In the Sierra Gorda of Querétaro, companies that pay for the carbon captured by forests are funding the people who keep those forests standing. Figures presented to Mexico's environment secretary, Alicia Bárcena, during a visit to the Sierra Gorda Biosphere Reserve state that in 2025 the scheme, called Carbono Biodiverso, reported 400 forest beneficiaries, more than 40,000 hectares conserved and 52 million pesos generated a year. Querétaro's secretary of sustainable development, Marco Antonio del Prete Tercero, gave the numbers, the environment ministry, Semarnat, said on November 7.

Bárcena began her visit on November 6 and met state officials and the Grupo Ecológico Sierra Gorda, the civil group led by Martha Isabel Ruíz Corzo, at Centro Tierra in Jalpan de Serra. In a second release, published on November 8, Semarnat said she had proposed that the region's ejido members and landowners train communities in other parts of Mexico to apply the model, and that the communities document in their own words how they restored their land and what income and local jobs that work brought.

How the payments work

Companies pay for the carbon captured on the properties taking part, with the Grupo Ecológico Sierra Gorda as the channel, Querétaro's undersecretary for the environment, Ricardo Javier Torres Hernández, explained during a presentation of the state's low-carbon seal, the Sello Querétaro de Bajas Emisiones de Carbono. He said the income pays for work that demands patrols, record-keeping and checks in the field.

Landowners told the secretary what the money has changed. The ejido of Escanelilla put 317 hectares into the scheme after its vegetation began to come back once the community took its cattle off the land. One owner said his family spends part of the income on staff who keep roads and access tracks in order, another that it helps pay for patrols against illegal logging, and a man from El Pocito that he now sees animals on his land that he did not see before. Bárcena also walked through an oak forest regenerating in the ejido of La Yerbabuena, where cattle were withdrawn voluntarily.

The reserve

The Sierra Gorda reserve was created by a federal decree published on May 19, 1997, covering 383,567 hectares, according to Conanp, the national protected-areas commission that runs it. Conanp calls it the only reserve in Mexico that came about through an initiative of local people, a process the Grupo Ecológico Sierra Gorda started in 1987. It joined UNESCO's world network of biosphere reserves in 2003, and Conanp's fact sheet lists it as Ramsar wetland site 1352.

The two Conanp sources describe its extent differently. The reserve page, recalling the 2000 management program, places it in five municipalities of Querétaro: Arroyo Seco, Jalpan de Serra, Landa de Matamoros, Peñamiller and Pinal de Amoles. The fact sheet lists 15 municipalities in Querétaro, Guanajuato, San Luis Potosí and Hidalgo, with an area of 383,567.44 hectares. Conanp's page calls the reserve the most diverse in ecosystems among Mexico's main federal protected areas; the fact sheet lists conifer, oak and cloud forest, dry scrub, and both deciduous and evergreen tropical forest.

The releases do not say how much of the land in the carbon scheme lies inside the reserve. On the second day of the visit, the secretary also stopped at Los Montes, a center that collects recyclable materials, and at the workshop of a women's cooperative in La Colgada, in Pinal de Amoles, whose embroidery is inspired by the Sierra Gorda's wildlife and plants.