Paper short abstract:

The growth in carbon & biodiversity credits is hailed as a way to combat climate change. Farmers for Climate Action promotes credits to ‘reward farmers’ & ‘grow the carbon market’. But more radical voices are calling for degrowth & rejecting capitalist solutions to capitalist problems.

Paper long abstract:

Many farmers are drawn into the rhetoric of financial rewards for good custodianship - they believe they should be paid for sequestering carbon and protecting biodiversity. Farmers for Climate Action in Australia has said that carbon and biodiversity credits will provide ‘permanent ongoing funding to reward farmers for the good work they’re doing and provide sustainable, drought-resistant income,’ and going further, asserts that ‘Farmers for Climate Action has been calling for this kind of practical, on-ground assistance to grow the carbon market.’ While one can empathise with farmers’ interest in greater financial security in increasingly unstable climatic and economic conditions, the baked-in logic of pricing is to transform credits into tradable commodities, with the associated offsets available to polluters and destroyers of biodiversity.

But there are alternative voices calling for degrowth and rejecting the increasing commodification of nature, including the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA), a national civil society organisation representing small-scale farmers and their allies for food sovereignty and an agroecological transition. This paper draws on the author’s activist participatory research to argue that movements for climate action must necessarily involve a radical economic transformation alongside the ecological. Drawing on Indigenous ways of knowing and being in the world, and building on the work of Illich, Plumwood, Harvey, Büscher, Fletcher, and Graeber, it argues that the value of nature lies not in its capacity for capitalist accumulation, but in the ways it allows humans and more-than-humans to live convivial lives.