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- Convenors:
-
Laure Manach
(CNRS)
Stephanie Barral (INRAE)
Robin Leclerc (INRAE)
Helene Guillemot
Antoine Doré
Celine Granjou (Inrae (University of Grenoble-Alps))
Leo Magnin (CNRS)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract:
This panel explores the promotion of environmental compartments as carbon sinks and unpack the politics of knowledge at play when they are recast as major players in the global carbon cycle. Papers may explore agricultural soils, forests, wetlands and marine ecosystems, and other environments.
Long Abstract:
With the Paris Agreement and the adoption of carbon neutrality commitments, some environmental compartments, including forests and soils, are increasingly viewed as global stocks of carbon that we need to measure, map, model, control and optimize, to achieve a ‘net’ zero carbon balance in the atmosphere. This open panel explores the rising promotion of these environmental compartments as carbon sinks and unpacks the politics of knowledge at play when they are recast as major players in the global carbon cycle. While scholarship interested in the politics of carbon sinks has often centered on forests, we are especially keen to address lesser-known ecosystems, such as soils and oceans.
Questions include:
1 - What does it take to produce knowledge on carbon stocks and fluxes between soils, forests, vegetation and the atmosphere? How are carbon stocks and fluxes known, measured, monitored and assessed? How does the rising interest in carbon reconfigure research communities, political agendas and market infrastructures?
2 - How does carbon sink knowledge translate into public organizations, policies, programs and instruments aiming to manage and increase carbon stocks for various ends? What promises does it entail for environmental policies?
3 - How does the politics of knowledge of carbon sinks reconfigure the ways in which we come to know and manage various environments, their micro and macro-biota and the human activities and livelihoods within them?
Papers may be located in science and technology studies as well as anthropology, sociology, geography, political science, history, etc. and address some of the above questions concerning agricultural soils, forests, wetlands, oceans and marine ecosystems, and other environmental compartments.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Nassima Abdelghafour (CEMS (EHESS) - IFRIS)
Long abstract:
Recent scientific publications, policy discussions and public outreach articles deal with large-scale forestation in Africa either as an opportunity for climate mitigation or as a threat for grassy ecosystems. In 2019, researchers mostly based in Europe published an article in the prestigious journal Science, featuring a map of the “global tree restoration potential”, suggesting that large areas of sub-Saharan Africa were available for “tree restoration” (Bastin et al. 2019). Against such calls for urgent and massive carbon-related afforestation policies, recent publications by natural scientists warn against the afforestation of peatlands, grassy ecosystems and savannas, deemed detrimental to biodiversity and even to carbon sequestration capacity. South African scientists published a comment to Bastin et al., arguing that savannas are not suitable sites for forestation (Veldman et al. 2019). Moreover one of the authors further added in a media interview that “the impacts on our natural ecosystems in Africa would be devastating”. Whereas remote sensing specialists tend to support massive deforestation in Africa, ecologists tend to warn against it. This suggests two hypotheses. First, the position for or against forestation is related to disciplinary approaches and the scientific gaze (distant or close) that they entail. Second, there is a geopolitics to forestation-related sciences that shapes the ways in which different scientific communities from different parts of the world value forest and non-forest ecosystems. This paper is based on document analysis and semi-directive interviews with scientists.
Seulgi Lee Chihyung Jeon (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology) Sungeun Kim (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology)
Long abstract:
While the IPCC currently recognizes only three types of marine ecosystems—mangroves, salt marshes, and seagrass beds—as effective carbon sinks, maritime nations are strategically generating evidence to claim other ecosystems as potential sources of carbon credit. In this study, we examine one such initiative by the South Korean government to cope with the rising pressure to reduce carbon emissions. South Korea’s recent research project on “blue carbon” proposes tidal flats as a promising part of its territory that can offset the nation’s carbon footprint. The research project highlights the carbon absorbed and stored by the marine ecosystem throughout Korea’s tidal flats, which will potentially serve as a useful carbon sink. By analyzing technical reports and interviewing stakeholders involved in this research, we show that the state utilizes ecological science to transform disorderly tidal flats into uniform, quantifiable, and comparable containers of carbon. In constructing an argument that Korean tidal flats do absorb carbon, the ecological scientists classify heterogeneous coastal spaces, sample representative tidal marshes, and circulate their scientific findings internationally. The work of the state-employed ecological scientists, however, is not purely scientific. As ecological scientists quantify the carbon cycle of coastal landscapes, they simultaneously reevaluate their cultural and economic significance. Tidal flats are considered worthy of preservation, not because of their ecological distinctiveness, but because of their ability to produce exchangeable carbon credit. Blue carbon counters reshape the physical and cultural landscape of tidal flats by prioritizing the number of carbon as the measure of coastal governance.
Goetz Hoeppe (University of Waterloo)
Long abstract:
In 2009 the German-Indian LOHAFEX experiment set out to release 20 tons of iron sulphate into an eddy in the southern Atlantic Ocean for the study of its impact on the growth of phytoplankton and the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. While it was not the first experiment on ocean iron fertilization (OIF), LOHAFEX became quickly entangled in a widely publicised controversy on the dangers and benefits of OIF as geoengineering that involved international NGOs and two German federal ministries before its final approval. According to some commentators, the controversy around LOHAFEX delayed research on the viability of OIF for sequestrating carbon dioxide. Fifteen years later and in a changed context, a diverse set of ocean-based carbon dioxide removal technologies is being proposed, still including OIF. Drawing on archival material and interviews, this paper reconstructs how the LOHAFEX controversy unfolded. Informed by STS work on the public engagement with science it explores the grounds of comparing LOHAFEX with proposed marine carbon dioxide removal techniques and explores what could be learned from the LOHAFEX controversy for examining their viability and social acceptability.
Yvonne Kunz
Long abstract:
Scientists and the international community agree that if the aim to limit the temperature increase to 1.5° Celsius above pre-industrial levels, it is not enough to just reduce emissions. Carbon dioxide additionally needs to be removed from the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide removals (CDR) and carbon capture and storage (CCS) are often included in climate models producing future scenarios (Boettcher at al 2021, Hansson et al 2022). These "solutions" are challenged by immature technological systems and a lack of knowledge regarding social-ecological feasibilities. Blue carbon, understood as carbon stored in and through coastal vegetated ecosystems seem to be appear as the least controversial way to capture huge amounts of carbon. On its website, the probably biggest German-based project researching Blue Carbon, sea4soCiety, states that it aims to “improve competence for the assessment of potential and feasibility, risks and societal acceptance”. As part of the sea4soCiety project and with empirical fieldwork on German and Indonesian coasts, this paper seeks to ask the question, whose competence is going to be improved, by whom and through what kind of knowledge (Kunz et al. 2023)? What risks are considered and how can acceptance of blue carbon initiatives diminish risks? The term blue carbon is followed from the international level where the term was coined, to national levels where frameworks are to be established, to the local level where coastal vegetated ecosystems have been valued before blue carbon has been “discovered” by scientists. This journey hints towards false assumptions, in the models and the role of societal acceptance of blue carbon projects.
Chi-Mao Wang (Department of Bio-Industry Communication and Development, National Taiwan University, Taiwan) Damian Maye (University of Gloucestershire) Julie Ingram
Long abstract:
The agri-food sector is poised for a profound transformation in the upcoming decade, driven by the increasing need and urgency to achieve net zero emissions and avoid exceeding planetary boundaries in food and farming. The market is often considered a key mechanism to address planetary changes, employing various market devices to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. Consequently, agricultural industries are increasingly governed by market rules, a phenomenon called 'marketisation' by scholars like Callon and MacKenzie. Recent research on the marketisation of agricultural production places significant emphasis on the performative aspect of metrics, examining how different GHGs are standardized. Critical examinations of metrics have demonstrated their role in homogenizing diverse elements, transforming soil into something calculable, visible, and tradable. However, an exclusive focus on 'metric power' often neglects the challenges that arise when these metrics are implemented. Pragmatic economists, or ‘economists in the wild,’ have enlisted various sociotechnical actors and strategies to support the existence of economic discourses, including in relation to agri-carbon markets. Drawing on fieldwork in Taiwan and supplemented by research materials from reports and workshops in the UK and Europe, we have identified two dimensions characterizing these strategies: aligning economic interests and utilizing simplified natural-based geoengineering technologies. Thus, the marketization of soil carbon represents an anthropocentric approach to using life to manage life, aiming more at generating economic interest in the soil than addressing urgent planetary crises. The latter demands a more attuned approach to soil needs and conservation instead of a short-term, metric-based approach to soil care.
Aneurin Merrill-Glover (University of Bristol)
Long abstract:
This paper explores the emergent practices of knowledge production directed towards the creation of a carbon-based economic model for peatland restoration. Globally, peatlands hold more than twice as much carbon as all forests but, at the same time, emissions from historically-drained peatlands remain strikingly high. Against this backdrop, a diverse range of organisations are experimenting with rewetting degraded peatlands as a potentially powerful form of climate change mitigation and an essential component of ‘net zero’ transitions. In the UK, visions of scaled-up peatland restoration are increasingly placing hopes on voluntary carbon markets to bridge the funding gap between public finance and ambitious restoration goals.
This paper studies the politics of knowledge surrounding efforts to create new carbon-based peat economies drawing on research conducted on two sites in the south of the UK. More specifically, we explore how conservation organisations work to trial and showcase the technical and economic viability of carbon finance in the context of intensively managed agricultural land vulnerable to flooding. These trials involve a diverse range of monitoring techniques, deployed to demonstrate the success of restoration interventions, and thereby ostensibly validate the resulting carbon credits. The paper explores how the production of data on the ground and speculative carbon finance mechanisms are brought together to convince local farmers to commit their lands to rewetting. How is data generated, selected, obfuscated, and valorized in the making of new carbon-based peat economies?
Yuti Ariani Fatimah (University of Cambridge) Jennifer Gabrys (University of Cambridge)
Long abstract:
The uncertain and hypothetical nature of carbon credit calculations often involves the creation of counterfactuals to establish baselines, particularly in the context of forest loss rates and carbon sequestration. However, critics argue that counterfactual practices are inherently uncertain and vulnerable to questions about their integrity, potentially leading to the overestimation of deforestation and the creation of low-quality or invalid carbon credits. To address these concerns, recognising counterfactual plurality might give way to other practices for valuing and making more desirable forest worlds. In this regard, the concept of "counterfactual world-making" is proposed as a lens to investigate the multiplicity of counterfactual practices. This concept emphasises the collaborative and interconnected processes through which diverse entities contribute to constructing and assessing carbon sinks and the broader dynamics of carbon offsetting initiatives. By examining the case study of the Rimba Raya Biodiversity Reserve Project in Indonesia, three pathways through which counterfactual practices contribute to different modes of world-making are identified: by rendering forests into legal entities, estimating hypothetical forest carbon, and valuing forests through carbon markets. This investigation sheds light on the complex and dynamic processes through which different entities contribute to the construction and assessment of carbon sinks and the broader dynamics of carbon offsetting initiatives, offering critical insights into the complexities of assessing and valuing carbon sequestration projects within the carbon market.
Jan Gilles (London School of Economics and Political Science)
Long abstract:
The logic of net-zero climate targets demands not only emission reductions but also carbon sinking. Decarbonisation is expected to be complemented by systematic carbon dioxide removal compensating for those emissions that are considered hard to abate. Various methods – from planting new forests, soil carbon enhancement through biochar application and ocean fertilization, to enhanced rock weathering and direct air capture with carbon storage - promise to measurably remove carbon from the atmosphere and durably sink it in four forms: in biogenic material through photosynthesis, as solid minerals, dissolved in fluid or as a gas stored in geological formations underground. But what does durability mean? How is it measured, compared and evaluated? Based on expert interviews with professionals and scientists in the British carbon dioxide removal industry, in this paper I will explore the politics of knowledge of carbon sink temporalities. Tracing the production of imaginaries of durability carried by different carbon sink actors, I will show how an arbitrary framing of temporality becomes an instrument to legitimize some sinks over others. Using durability as a lens, the paper argues that studying the politics of carbon sinks needs to go beyond the dichotomy of environmental compartments and engineered technologies and instead explore all forms carbon sinking as practices of climate change mitigation that configure the human-environmental relationship in different ways.