Introduction to themed issue: “Green security in protected areas”

This introduction to the themed issue discusses the articulation of protected areas, conservation, and security in issue contributions. Protected areas are presented as localized sites to address global crises, such as anthropogenic climate change and the “war on terror.” When they are sites for securitization and militarization, protected areas articulate state and subject formations through violence. As threat discourses have amplified in recent years, communities once deemed putative eco-destroyers have been interpellated as potential threats in wars on drugs and/or terror. The themed issue reveals that reframing environmental crime as organized crime has significant implications for expanding claims of what counts as legitimate use of force in protected areas policing, as well as potential prosecutions. It is apparent that security for one group may hinge on the insecurity of another group at different historical and political moments. In this special issue we challenge conservation actors as well as those critical of conservation to ask: for whom does conservation provide security, under what circumstances, and at what cost?     

China’s huge investment on water facilities: an effective adaptation to climate change, natural disasters, and food security

China’s huge investment on water infrastructure for sustainable water use, followed by recently frequent natural disasters, caused worldwide concerns, i.e., continuously published by Nature and Science. Most researchers emphasized challenges on this investment; yet, we argue that the 2011-plan, targeting reservoirs, wells, irrigation systems, inter-basin water transfer projects, is the most effective adaptation to climate change, drought and flooding, as well as food security. This provides a good case of water management and development, particularly for the current uneven water resources and food security by climate change.     

The importance of talc and chlorite “hybrid” rocks for volatile recycling through subduction zones; evidence from the high-pressure subduction mélange of New Caledonia

The transfer of fluid and trace elements from the slab to the mantle wedge cannot be adequately explained by simple models of slab devolatilization. The eclogite-facies mélange belt of northern New Caledonia represents previously subducted oceanic crust and contains a significant proportion of talc and chlorite schists associated with serpentinite. These rocks host large quantities of H₂O and CO₂ and may transport volatiles to deep levels in subduction zones. The bulk-rock and stable isotope compositions of talc and chlorite schist and serpentinite indicate that the serpentinite was formed by seawater alteration of oceanic lithosphere prior to subduction, whereas the talc and chlorite schists were formed by fluid-induced metasomatism of a mélange of mafic, ultramafic and metasedimentary rocks during subduction. In subduction zones, dehydration of talc and chlorite schists should occur at sub-arc depths and at significantly higher temperatures (∼ 800°C) than other lithologies (400–650°C). Fluids released under these conditions could carry high trace-element contents and may trigger partial melting of adjacent pelitic and mafic rocks, and hence may be vital for transferring volatile and trace elements to the source regions of arc magmas. In contrast, these hybrid rocks are unlikely to undergo significant decarbonation during subduction and so may be important for recycling carbon into the deep mantle. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.     

Reply to the comments on “Xenoliths in ultrapotassic volcanic rocks in the Lhasa block: direct evidence for crust–mantle mixing and metamorphism in the deep crust”

Stepanov et al. (Contrib Mineral Petrol, 2017) question our conclusion that the UPVs in southern Tibet were derived by partial melting of an old, metasomatized subcontinental lithospheric mantle (SCLM) of the subducted Indian plate. Instead, they propose that these ultrapotassic volcanic rocks (UPVs) are shoshonitic and were generated in two steps: direct melting of crustal rocks first, and then the melts interacted with mantle peridotite. However, the trace element, isotopic, thermal, structural, and seismic evidence is consistent with the xenolith evidence (Wang et al in Contrib Mineral Petrol 172:62, 2016) for hybridisation of ascending Indian subcontinental lithospheric mantle-derived UPV magmas with the deep, isotopically unevolved, Tibetan crust. This necessitates a model whereby partial melting of subducting Indian SCLM generates the UPV suite of southern Tibet.     

“Love for sale”: Biodiversity banking and the struggle to commodify nature in Sabah,Malaysia

In Malaysia, second largest palm oil producer worldwide, logging companies, palm oil corporations, and even responsible citizens can now compensate their biodiversity impacts by purchasing Biodiversity Conservation Certificates in an emerging new biodiversity market: the Malua BioBank. Biodiversity markets are part of a wider trend of marketisation and neoliberalisation of biodiversity governance; introduced and promoted as (technical) win–win solutions to counter biodiversity loss and enable sustainable development. The existing neoliberalisation and nature literature has tended to analyse these processes as consequences of an inherent drive of capital to expand accumulation and submit ever more areas of nature to the neoliberal market logic.In contrast, I aim (a) to problematise the agency and the “work” behind marketisation of biodiversity, challenging the story of (corporate-driven) neoliberalisation as the realisation of an inherent market-logic (based on the a false conceptual state–market divide, often prevalent even in activist academic circles working on neoliberalisation of nature) and to see the state not only as regulator, but driving force behind, and part of “the market”; (b) to question the myth of neoliberalisation as state losing control to the market and to show how the state is using the biodiversity market as mode of governing; re-gaining control over its forests and its conservation policy; and (c) to demonstrate empirically the distinction between neoliberal ideology and practice, and to show that marketisation was based on pragmatic decisions, not ideology-driven political action. My analysis is based on 35 qualitative interviews with actors involved in the BioBank.