Emission Trading System and Forest: Learning from the Experience of New Zealand

In the area of international policy to mitigate climate change, the forest has been important in achieving the objectives of liable countries. The Emissions Trading System in New Zealand (NZ ETS) is the only case of an ETS integrating forestry as a mandatory actor. This is the result of prolonged political discussions and the characteristics of New Zealand forestry. Forest landowners are liable to surrender allowances for deforestation and can potentially receive allowances for the level of carbon sequestered. This scheme created new opportunities for forestry activities and impacted the decision-making trade-offs related to land-use changes. In Mexico, the implementation of an Emissions Trading System in 2020 is evidence of the country’s commitment to controlling domestic emissions under the Paris Agreement. Nevertheless, for now, the forestry sector is not involved as a liable actor. It is possible to envision the integration of the forest sector because of the extensive forest cover in the country, which provides a livelihood for a large part of the population. Mexico has the experience and institutional framework to integrate forestry into national emission accounting and carbon forest projects in the voluntary market. The potential impacts of this integration are both positive and negative. Environmental impacts are positive because forest areas can help mitigate emissions, but intensive carbon farming disrupts native forests and biodiversity. The economic impacts would be highly favorable for forest landowners if market volatility were controlled, but there is a potential loss of public revenue for the State. Finally, carbon forestry has the potential to cause conflict between economic sectors involved in land use and among participating communities.

Three Ways of Seeing a Forest: On the Social Life of Economization in Indian Carbon Forestry

Irrespective of controversies and frustrated efforts, carbon forestry—the sequestering of greenhouse gases in forests—remains a key element of climate change mitigation. Carbon forestry drives regularly rely on a market-based conservation framework, where forest dwellers are remunerated for their service of maintaining forests through dedicated financial instruments routing global funds. In this article, I turn to India’s first large-scale carbon forestry project, situated in the hills of Himachal Pradesh, and trace how carbon forestry plots are subjected to different temporal trajectories on different levels. I show that the marketing of emission reduction certificates (CER), underpinning carbon forestry, posits emergent forests as permanent sinks. The administrative procedures of this Indian carbon forestry project, however, aim at providing for these forests for sixty years. Finally, I show that villagers perceive a sense of closure, suspending dedicated care and governance routines as the project appears to dismantle and future payments become uncertain. I argue that these different temporal registers not only reveal contradictions within carbon forestry approaches but they also highlight the fragility of attempts to economize forests through supposedly green financial instruments and, therefore, the limited impact of what might appear as neoliberal agendas, in time.

Frictitious commodities: Virtuality, virtue and value in the carbon economy of repair

What ‘nature’ is being commodified in carbon markets, and why does it matter? How are carbon commodities and ecologies of repair co-produced through carbon forestry? Are the Polanyian notions of ‘fictitious commodification’ and ‘embeddedness’ appropriate for thinking about carbon forestry and voluntary carbon market (VCM) offsets? This article addresses these questions and extends the critical understanding of conservation in the ‘repair mode’ through an analysis that delves deeply into the black box of value production in the VCM. Focusing on the interplay of ‘virtuality’ and ‘virtue’ in the production of one variety of so-called ‘boutique’ blue forest carbon offset, this analysis demonstrates the technical abstractions needed isolate ‘carbon’ and force it into the commodity form create slippages between concrete socio-natures and geographies of offsetting and the imagined natures and geographies of a market environmentalist model of the world. This politics facilitates a dual pathway of accumulation via the material extraction of nature to feed the expansion of industrial growth (the subject of Polanyi’s critique) and, in parallel, through feeding new growth markets for nature-based commodities such as the VCM. These markets promise to repair the damage caused by industrial growth, but can only ‘work’ in the abstract, virtual realm despite entanglement with underlying concrete ecologies of repair. Based on this analysis, this article argues that the widespread view of carbon offsets as ‘embedded’ Polanyian fictitious commodities is incomplete, based on an ontological fallacy that conflates the ways in which concrete and abstracted, virtual ‘natures’ are used to produce value in the contemporary restoration economy. This fallacy implicitly reifies the central fictions and contradictions of carbon markets and the market environmentalist model more broadly. Considering VCM carbon forestry in terms of ‘scale-making’ and ‘world-making’ projects, the article presents an alternative conceptualisation of VCM carbon offsets as intangible ‘frictitious’ commodities that inhabit a complicated and only provisionally stabilised commodity form.

Carbon forestry compensation on estate level

The expense of carbon sequestration in terms of capital return deficiency is investigated at estate level, in the case of a fertile boreal estate dominated by spruce forest. Thinnings from below result as a high expense of increased rotation age, thinnings from above as a small expense. The expense of increased timber stock is greater than any proportional carbon rent based on present carbon prices. Application of non-proportional carbon rent is proposed.

Carbon-binding biomass or a diversity of useful trees? (Counter)topographies of carbon forestry in Uganda

Tree plantations in low-income countries are emerging as central tools for global climate change mitigation. However, there is growing evidence that focusing on the carbon-binding aspect of trees in such forests often oversimplifies political ecologies and constrains local livelihoods. One reason is a strong reliance on land use maps, leading to monodimensional and disconnected views of landscapes. This study examines one such climate forest, Kachung plantation in Uganda, run by the company Green Resources on land leased from the Ugandan state through its National Forest Authority. The carbon emission reductions are purchased by the Swedish Energy Agency. Drawing on the Katz conceptualisation of countertopographies, we present a ‘situated topography’ of Kachung based on the experiences of local women. In contrast to the ‘distant topography’ produced by the actors investing in the project, it reveals a dynamic landscape where women know and use a diversity of local trees and have well-established strategies for regeneration. However, their access to useful trees and farmland is constrained by the plantation, resulting in increased livelihood struggles. In line with Katz, we suggest that producing similar situated topographies for other climate forests can help create strong countertopographies, displaying more diverse, connected and dynamic uses of landscapes than seen from a distance.