Participation dynamics and institutional change in the Scolel Té carbon forestry project,Chiapas, Mexico

Carbon forestry has become a cornerstone of attempted climate change mitigation in developing countries. As such, dozens of projects have been developed to supply carbon offsets to both voluntary and regulated carbon markets. In this paper we shed further light on the effects of such projects on communities and households by studying the implementation of a carbon forestry project in four communities in the state of Chiapas, Mexico. The project pays farmers to carry out a number of tree-planting activities depending on the local agro-ecological systems. We investigate how such activities have been promoted in and adopted by communities and we identify a series of community-based, institutional, resource management and asset-related factors that explain farmers’ willingness to participate in the projects. Our analysis highlights a number of shared motivations for joining the project but varied levels of understanding about the project rationale. We also show how community norms, access to land tenure, financial and physical assets differ among participants and non-participants which translates in increasing inequalities in access to income and to other development projects. However, we also demonstrate that project activities, as currently designed, motivate some farmers to participate because of the potential of the project to act as a mechanism to bridge existing social divides through cooperation in the project and therefore financially and politically benefit from participation. Overall, the paper demonstrates that the project contributes to transforming local livelihoods and institutions, unfortunately not always as originally designed.     

Forest offsets and the California compliance market: Bringing an abstract ecosystem good to market

Improved Forest Management (IFM) projects under the California cap-and-trade market allow production of new, non-traditional commodities: forest carbon offsets. Earlier analyses have considered forest offsets generated through tree planting in the Global South, as vehicles for sustainable development. However, the California IFM program is testing offset production in new geographic and forest management contexts: with offsets produced and consumed within the US on working (timber producing) forests. With data drawn from California IFM project design documents and in-depth interviews with carbon project developers, this study traces the development, sale, and maintenance of forest offsets, in order to map access to benefits along the commodity chain. Results reveal that the cost and complexity of rendering biological services ‘real’ for market legitimacy are reducing benefits to marginal landowners, who lack needed capital, knowledge, and technology to bring offsets to market. An important insight of this study is that the state has maintained power over program participation and offset supply through control of the forest offset methodology, creating a production process largely mediated by the state, adding risk and uncertainty to market participation. Findings provide an empirical example of neoliberal nature and offer broader lessons on governance and benefit distribution for ecosystem service commodity chains.     

Neoliberalisation,rural land trusts and institutional blending

In the context of rural land conservation, neoliberalisation involves an increasingly wide range of changes in formal and informal institutional arrangements. These affect the relationship between the state and the market in a variety of ways and have different implications for the governance of rural land. In the context of rural land conservation in the UK, we identify a broad range of changes to policy that promote altered ownership and market related institutional forms, all of which might be seen as forms of neoliberalisation. In some instances these promote market forces and private ownership, while in others they push back the market and support collectivisation. We argue that the complex processes of the decomposition property and reassignment of property rights and the emergence of new forms of governance and partnership are better characterised in terms of institutional blending.     

REDD+ for Red Books? Negotiating rights to land and livelihoods through carbon governance in the Central Highlands of Vietnam

In Vietnam, initial programs to Reduce Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) have proliferated through international finance and new governance regimes for climate change mitigation. National capacity and legal frameworks have been adjusted to make the country eligible for REDD+ financing. In some local areas, activities have been implemented to ‘produce’ carbon credits intended for the international voluntary carbon market. Through a case study of a pilot REDD+ project in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, we examine how REDD+ has intersected with property rights institutions and agrarian change to influence changing property relations and commodity markets. Our findings show that REDD+ implemented through state and local institutions has articulated with the local political economy to coproduce conditions that embody local norms, needs, and desires. Specifically, local actors negotiate state-sanctioned tenurial instruments used for REDD+ governance, not for the purposes of carbon sequestration but instead in order to reassert their rights to land and forest for the cultivation of boom crops—the antithesis of REDD+ objectives. In the fine balancing act of adjusting local forestland holdings, REDD+ implementation has effectively facilitated increased opportunities for upland villagers to strategically claim land titles from local political authorities in the form of communal land certificates for forests called ‘Red Books’. In securing communal Red Books, villagers redefine or co-constitute the purpose of REDD+ to secure land for cash crop and commercial timber production. As with other forms of environmental governance, REDD+ is thus co-constituted locally in line with state and local institutions and histories and present day realities.     

Payments for environmental services as neoliberal market-based forest conservation in Vietnam: Panacea or problem?

Recently in Vietnam, a coalition of international NGOs, donors and government officials have been promoting market-based forest conservation projects in the form of payments for environmental services (PES) as a win–win for both conservation and development objectives; Vietnam is now the first country in Southeast Asia with a national law on PES. This article provides a macro survey of how market-based instruments for forest conservation have expanded in Vietnam, particularly in relation to a long dominant state sector. Yet an assessment of Vietnam’s PES pilot projects indicates that they do not follow predicted orthodox “neoliberalization of nature” approaches in their use of market instruments, particularly in regards to privatization, retreat of the state, and capitalization of commodities. The article explores how it is that a strong state role in forest management can continue to dominate even in more market-oriented approaches. Finally, the article analyzes PES’s potential for success or failure in tackling the underlying causes for forest degradation. Ultimately, the article argues that PES is likely to be unable to tackle several of the key underlying causes for deforestation, namely, uneven land tenure and a lack of participation by local communities in conservation, given that PES is unlikely to be considerably different than past attempts at forest management.     

Contested carbon: Carbon forestry as a speculatively virtual,falteringly material and disputed territorial assemblage

Assemblage approaches are increasingly being used to understand new socio-natural formations arising in relation to the multiple crises of capitalism, climate change and environmental degradation. The valuation of nature is key to these new formations, which the creation of new ‘valued entities’, through calculative practices, that can be accounted for, costed and circulated in monetised and financialised forms in order to ostensibly ‘fix’ certain environmental outcomes in relation to contemporary global crisis. This paper uses an assemblage approach in relation to the global’ transnational project of carbon forestry offsetting and REDD+ in a particular place, Uganda, arguing that it has utility in this respect. While Uganda has been named by Lang and Byakola (2005) as a ‘funny place to store carbon’ due to its contested land politics and history of violence its weak governance context paradoxically re-enforces the imperative for intervention. The paper argues that carbon forestry assemblages are inherently ephemeral and fundamentally contested in three ways: exhibiting a speculative virtuality, faltering materiality and disputed territoriality. Such analysis has the ability to go beyond technical and managerial, or solely pollical economic critiques of carbon forestry, to point at openings for alternatives.     

A political ecology of REDD+: Property rights,militarised protectionism,and carbonised exclusion in Cross River

This paper offers a critical assessment of REDD+ in Nigeria through a political ecology perspective. Focusing on questions of property rights and resource access, it maps the discursive articulations and contestations through which carbon rights are being determined. It also shows how these articulations and contestations are linked to land and forest rights, and how they shape everyday access to the forest. Evidence from the Nigerian case suggests that factors that complicate rights and undermine access to resources for forest communities under REDD+ are immanent to the contested terrain constituted in part by REDD+ proposals, proponents’ discourses and practices geared towards securing the forest for REDD+. Efforts to secure property rights and guarantee the permanence of REDD+ forests align with economic, ecological and ideological aspirations of state and non-state actors to produce a regime of militarised protectionism. I demonstrate how, in addition to its material and symbolic facilitation of the emergent carbon forestry economy, militarised protectionism as a regime of exclusion also constitutes collateral political economies of ‘more-than-carbon’ forest resources (such as timber and non-timber forest products) which perpetuate capital accumulation by the elites. It is this kind of exclusion–accumulation dialectic, legitimised by carbon forestry claims that this paper describes as carbonised exclusion. The paper thus furthers debates on the political ecology of REDD+ and other carbon forestry projects, while productively engaging technocentric literature on REDD+ and property rights.     

Towards ‘hybrid accountability’ in EU biofuels policy? Community grievances and competing water claims in the Central Kalimantan oil palm sector

The EU biofuels market is stimulating expansion of oil palm plantations in Indonesia. Little research has yet examined the impacts on water resources arising from this large-scale land use conversion to cultivation of biofuel feedstock or positioned contextual water resource governance in Indonesian locales in a wider political ecology of European climate politics. Through the concept of ‘hybrid accountability’, we examine primary evidence from an extensive action research process in Central Kalimantan Province, Indonesian Borneo, to assess whether the EU’s Renewable Energy Directive and existing certification schemes offer a way to improve the accountability of market actors and promote sustainable water resource management. We conclude that these initiatives have had no bearing on safeguarding local livelihoods and the water resources they depend on, with governance mechanisms largely failing to address people’s grievances. Rather, the EU’s policies on biofuels have supported a de-politicisation of what needs to be seen as ‘distributional water politics’. Furthermore, certification schemes such as the Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil offer, at present, only cosmetic tools and are insufficient to address deep structural governance issues. We argue that further hybridisation of market-based certification and governmental regulation should be designed with the purpose of providing new transnational recourse mechanisms and remedies for affected communities.     

Virtual nature,violent accumulation: The ‘spectacular failure’ of carbon offsetting at a Ugandan National Park

In East Africa, financially strained governments increasingly experiment with voluntary, market-based carbon offset schemes for enhancing the public management of protected areas. Often, conservationists and governments portray these as ‘triple-win’ solutions for climate change mitigation, biodiversity preservation, and local socioeconomic development. Examining such rhetoric, this paper analyses the rise and decline of an integrated carbon offset and conservation initiative at Mount Elgon National Park in eastern Uganda, involving a partnership between the Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA) and a Dutch NGO, Face the Future. In doing so, the paper reveals the ways in which the uncompensated dispossession of local residents was a necessary precondition for the project’s implementation. Although external auditors expected the project to sequester 3.73 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO₂e) between 1994 and 2034, conflicts forced the scheme to cease reforestation in 2003. Noting this rapid decline, we problematize the ways in which Face the Future and other carbon market intermediaries represented their activities via project documents and websites, obscuring the violence that was necessary for the project’s implementation. In so doing, we argue that the maintenance of a ‘triple win’ spectacle is itself integral to the management of carbon sequestration projects, as it provides consumers with a form of ‘ethical’ use value, and greatly enhances the capacity of carbon market brokers to accumulate exchange value by attracting ‘green’ investors. Consequently, what we term a ‘spectacular failure’ manifests in at least two ways: first, in the unravelling of the heavily mediatized spectacle of harmonious, profitable conservation, and, second, in the deleterious nature of the consequences that accrue to local communities and ecosystems alike.     

Private agri-food governance and greenhouse gas abatement: Constructing a corporate carbon economy

Private sector actors are playing an increasingly significant role in the definition and governance of ‘sustainable’ agri-food practices. Yet, to date little attention has been paid by social scientists to how greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are addressed as part of private agri-food governance arrangements. This paper examines how private actors within agri-food supply chains respond to emerging pressure for measures to reduce GHG emissions from agriculture. Drawing upon the Anglo-Foucauldian governmentality literature, we introduce the notion of the corporate carbon economy to conceptualise the practical techniques that enable private agri-food actors to make GHG emissions thinkable and governable in the context of existing market, regulatory, and supply chain pressures. Using a case study of the Australian dairy industry, we argue that private agri-food actors utilise a range of techniques that enable them to respond to existing government environmental regulations, balance current market pressures with future supply chain requirements, and demonstrate improved eco-efficiency along food supply chains. These techniques – which include environmental self-assessment instruments, tools for measuring GHG emissions, and sustainability reporting – have little direct relevance to the ‘international climate regime’ of carbon trading, and carbon markets more broadly, yet individually and in combination they are crucial in enacting an alternative regime of GHG governance. In concluding, we contend that the growing use of sustainability metrics by international food companies is likely to have the most powerful implications for GHG governance in the agri-food sector, with potentially far-reaching consequences for how future action on climate change is rendered thinkable and practicable.     

The choreography of sacrifice: Market environmentalism,biopolitics and environmental damage

Market environmentalism, and, arguably its exemplar carbon forestry, has been engaged within human and economic geography by drawing from the Marxist tradition, and to a lesser extent, utilising post-structuralist lines of enquiry. A direct focus on how practices and transformations related to carbon forestry could be construed as ‘sacrifical’, however, is lacking. This article seeks to remedy this by attending to the biopolitics of climate security discourse and interventions as they localise in an ‘assemblage of market environmentalism’ in Uganda. It charts a choreography of sacrifice that emerges under a neoliberal environmentality within this entity, namely, where the activities and ‘moves’ of both state and non-state actors constitute the grounds for forms of both direct and circuitous bio-cultural sacrifice. Here both surplus populations of people, the non-commercial component of Ugandan forestry, and those forest areas which are not amenable to having ‘nature pay for itself’ through carbon sequestration, are written off through direct violence and degradation, on the one hand, and through the naturalisation of broader processes of deforestation, on the other.     

以减少碳损失为目标的印度大城市可持续林业：以德里地区为例

试图识别德里从大气中固碳的碳源行为以及进一步证明各种造林工程有利于控制碳损失。碳化气的释放来源于城市的各个环节，包括城市的居民生活、工业过程、电力生产和轮船及热源工厂的辐射。这里主要想证明德里的土地利用/覆盖变化通过砍伐森林来进行地铁、立交桥、建筑和其他非森林可持续的城市建设对森林和树木覆盖造成的压力。所有的这些都导致德里的微气候变化，尤其是气温的升高。造林工程可以提供大量的气候变化缓解效应。     

Carbon peak and carbon neutrality in China: Goals,implementation path and prospects

Climate change is a common problem in human society. The Chinese government promises to peak carbon dioxide emissions by 2030 and strives to achieve carbon neutralization by 2060. The proposal of the goal of carbon peak and carbon neutralization has led China into the era of climate economy and set off a green change with both opportunities and challenges. On the basis of expounding the objectives and specific connotation of China’s carbon peak and carbon neutralization, this paper systematically discusses the main implementation path and the prospect of China’s carbon peak and carbon neutralization. China’s path to realizing carbon neutralization includes four directions: (1) in terms of carbon dioxide emission control: energy transformation path, energy conservation, and emission reduction path; (2) for increasing carbon sink: carbon capture, utilization, and storage path, ecological governance, and land greening path; (3) in key technology development: zero-carbon utilization, coal new energy coupling, carbon capture utilization and storage (CCUS), energy storage technology and other key technology paths required to achieve carbon peak and carbon neutralization; (4) from the angle of policy development: Formulate legal guarantees for the government to promote the carbon trading market; Formulate carbon emission standards for enterprises and increase publicity and education for individuals and society. Based on practicing the goal and path of carbon peak and carbon neutralization, China will vigorously develop low carbon and circular economy and promote green and high-quality economic development; speed up to enter the era of fossil resources and promoting energy transformation; accelerate the integrated innovation of green and low-carbon technologies and promote carbon neutrality.©2021 China Geology Editorial Office.     

全球气候变化对森林生态系统影响的研究(述评)

由于大气中二氧化碳等温室气体浓度的急剧增加,全球气候正呈现变暖多雨的趋势。全球气候变化对森林生态系统影响的研究是现代森林生态学的一个重要发展方向。本文综述了全球气候变化对森林生态系统影响研究的目的、内容和主要方法。全球气候变化将不同程度地影响森林生态系统分布、组成、结构、功能和生产力,同时也将影响生物多样性。森林生态系统的长期定位监测、实验生态学和生态系统的计算机建模是开展全球气候变化对森林生态系统影响研究的主要方法。最后简要探讨了全球气候变化对我国森林生态系统影响研究的现状及存在的问题。     

Effects of common property resource utilization on wildlife conservation in Nigeria

A survey was conducted in 21 rural settlements to assess wildlife conservation under a common utilization. Wildlife was managed through traditional regulations to meet subsistence requirements for food, income, recreation and health care. However, the conditions under which common property resource utilization thrived: traditional beliefs, communal land tenure system and uncertain income streams were almost disintegrated by changes in land use and social attitudes.The resource base for rural economies, the natural vegetation, was in crisis of depletion and degradation due to modern techniques of agricultural and forestry production. A conservative strategy is suggested. Rural land use should be based on planned agroforestry practices: smallholder tree planting, protection and regeneration of indigenous plants with potential social and economic value, domestication of wild animals and ranching of game with livestock.     

北方针叶林对气候变化响应的研究进展

北方针叶林地处北半球中高纬度地区,增温剧烈,是受气候变化影响最显著的地区之一.据预测,在未来气候变化情景下,北方针叶林将向北迁移,且可能完全移出我国,从而将对气候系统及全球碳收支产生重要的反馈作用.因此,北方针叶林在气候变化与全球碳收支中具有十分重要的作用.从气候变化的影响及碳循环研究方面综述了北方针叶林近年来的最新研究进展,探讨了未来北方针叶林拟重点加强的研究领域,为深入理解北方针叶林对气候变化的响应、制定适宜的气候变化对策提供参考依据.     

A Study of Global Change Population and Economic System Risk Forming Mechanism and Assessment

Global climate change featured with warming has created serious challenge to world sustainable development and human security. It has become an important consensus of the international society to assess global change risk at the global scale and carry out tailored governance and risk-based adaptation. National Key Research and Development Program “Study on global change population and economic system risk forming mechanism and assessment” aims at quantitatively predicting future global climate change and population and economic system exposure and vulnerability change, developing global change population and economic system risk assessment model based on complex system dynamics, synthesizing risk assessment model with proprietary intellectual property rights, assess global change population and economic system risk of the near and mid future at the global scale, and compiling the atlas of global change population and economic system risk. The outcomes intend to serve the participation of global risk governance and international climate negotiation, and to provide scientific support to the implementation of international disaster risk reduction strategy.     

Sustainable indigenous futures in remote Indigenous areas: relationships, processes and failed state approaches

In many Indigenous territories, continuing processes of primitive accumulation driven by governments?? claims to resources and territory simultaneously deny Indigenous rights and insist on market forces as the foundation for economic and social futures in Indigenous domains. Drawing on research in North Australia, this paper identifies the erasure of Indigenous governance, the development of wickedly complex administrative systems, continuing structural and procedural racism and state hostility to Indigenous rights as constructing Indigenous vulnerability to poverty, addiction and underdevelopment. Shaping sustainable Indigenous futures in remote areas that are characterised by long-term development failure requires rethinking of remote local and regional economic relationships. Recognising remote regional economies as hybrid economies that rely on environmental, social and cultural wealth is an important first step in reorienting policy settings. It is also crucial that we acknowledge sustainable Indigenous futures cannot arise from policy interventions that rely on creating wealth for state and corporate appropriation and assume enough of this wealth can be redistributed to local Indigenous communities to constitute ??development??. Politically constructed crisis interventions, such as Australia??s recent actions in remote Northern Territory communities, represent a failure of state relationships rather than an appropriate and sustainable response to the challenge of Indigenous vulnerability. This paper argues that attention to Indigenous rights and development of good relationships and good processes of governance, autonomy and responsibility within communities as well as between them and governments is fundamental to sustainable Indigenous futures. Without this, neither government programs nor large-scale natural resource-based development projects can deliver sustainable futures for remote Indigenous groups.     

Property rights, land tenure and the racial discourses

A persistent theme in land and agrarian studies is the appropriation of land and natural resources by mostly Western foreigners and the inequitable division of land and natural resources between Indigenous people and white settlers. It was this overt racial inequality in land ownership and the accompanying structures of oppression that led to the rise of liberation movements in Africa, South America and Asia. Most, if not all, land and agrarian reform programmes in the former colonies take the racial inequality in land as their point of departure. The same applies to the process of changing the inequalities in the use and ownership of natural resources such as wildlife, fisheries and forests. Whereas critical scholarship and social movements vehemently opposed the racialized nature of land dispossession, less attention has been paid to the persistence of racialized tenure systems. The silence on the racial character of land and natural resource tenure is rather surprising given that colonial tenure systems were based on race and racist grounds. This paper draws on examples from nature conservancies and communal land reform in southern Africa to argue that the dual land and natural resource tenure inherent from colonialism and apartheid remains intact in contemporary southern Africa. It also suggests that the democratic governments in the region and critical scholarship have failed to challenge the racialized character of land tenure. Instead, they continued to reinvent orthodox views of society and culture. Race seems to matter most in property regimes in the region in as far as it relates to equity rather than its initial categorization of people. The consequences of the persistence of the racialized tenure systems are that the success or failure of land and resource use and management reproduces racial explanations.     

The future of informal settlements: lessons in the legalization of disputed urban land in Recife, Brazil

The aim of this paper is to explore the relationship between legalization of land tenure and people's capacity to compete for and sustain their stake in the urban land market. Two aspects of land regularization are taken into account: the benefits of land regularization (as collateral for investments); and the perverse aspects of disputes over improved land (due to increased scarcity of illegal, but affordable housing land). Most research on illegal urban land has systematically investigated how to legalize illegal settlements to improve the effectiveness of service provision, whilst attracting public investments. But, few understand the underlying factors motivating people to improve and consolidate their houses where no legal tenure exists. The absence of substantial understanding about people's perceptions of their tenure security has encouraged most research to conclude that improving tenure security leads to higher levels of housing consolidation. What this paper shows is that the relationship between people's perceptions of land tenure security and housing consolidation is much more malleable and complex than conventionally assumed. The subtle difference between tenure of the land and tenure of the house indicates that people are willing to invest in their housing conditions almost irrespectively of their land tenure situation. This finding challenges the orthodox views of the property rights school of thought. In addition, this paper contends that what legalization is really doing is to reduce the available land stock for the poorest families, because legalization decreases the amount of illegal land (illegal land is undesirable, but affordable for the poor). The orthodox legal system needs to be revised to include the poorest families in the urban society of the new millennium.