The Gaia Ledger is Earth's shared conscience: carbon, biomass, and water tallied basin by basin. It is also, a leaked reconciliation suggests, gently fictional. Two basins reported the same restored wetland; a rotating audit chain means whoever certifies last inherits everyone else's rounding. Restoration districts are paid in stewardship credits against those numbers, so an error is a payout. The Ledger's keepers insist the discrepancies are noise; a coalition of small basins says the noise always favors the large ones. The fight is quiet, technical, and about whether the recovery's central instrument can be trusted.
A leaked reconciliation shows two basins claiming the same restored wetland, and forty years of celebrated decline may not survive a clean count.
Stewardship credits are pegged to Gaia Ledger scores, and the auditors who set the scores get paid against them. The Exchange priced the conflict before the ethics boards opened the file.