Short abstract:

This paper feeds into debates on how financial value is extracted from peoples everyday life, and how climate change and its politics engenders social transformation within affected communities. It also contributes to debates on how community translates such changes into their own cultural terms.

Long abstract:

This paper focuses on the processes and practices that render an Amazonian traditional community ‘auditable’ and it discusses the social transformation this engenders. I draw on 14 months of fieldwork in a quilombola community where carbon credits are being produced. During my ethnography I observed all the necessary steps to create an environmental asset produced on a communal land and to increase its value to sell it on a global marketplace. Audit and certification emerged as key processes used by companies who produce carbon to secure financial returns for investors or clients. Making a community auditable required the mapping of the everyday lives of quilombolas and collecting of data on their relationship with the forest and their land. Verification implied creating evidence for all socio-environmental practices in order to register the social transformation across time. The carbon company was then able to come out with projections of a better future and improved practices that could be verified through auditing. To do so, the company follows the CCB (Community, Climate and Biodiversity) methodology & standard. CCB aggregates value across carbon credit units and increases the liquidity of assets. Using the analogy of C of community, I ask what the making of a community "auditable" reveals about financial market imaginaries about what a traditional community is or should become. "Community" and" traditional" have different meanings which conflict and overlap. I will also highlight how such ideals and moral standards clashed with the community's social and political organisation based on secrecy and sorcery.

Long abstract:

In the Puerto Carreño region, on the Eastside savannas of Colombia, everyone seems to be engaging in some form of carbon accounting. Agro-industrial firms, forestry investors, and bioenergy entrepreneurs are resorting to carbon accounting to justify offsetting schemes that bring additional revenues to their enterprises. Some of the carbon accounting methodologies used to analyze how much carbon is sequestered by some products like cashews, native trees, and biomass for bioenergy generation are still in the making. Agronomists, forestry engineers, and energy technicians are studying how local environmental and climatic conditions shape how much carbon is sequestered by these nature-based commodities. But carbon accounting prospects in this region take place after years of technoscientific efforts to adapt these commodities and turn them into industrial-scale profitable businesses. This paper analyzes how previous histories of forestry and agro-industrial development influence current carbon accounting efforts. I follow carbon practitioners as they try to make sense of environmental conditions that challenge, contest, and adapt to the carbon economy, evidencing the uncooperative nature (Bakker, 2003) of commodities to be entirely subsumed by novel forms of market-based carbon schemes (Carton, 2017). I show how, despite carbon practitioners’ and scientists’ assumptions, carbon accounting is not solely an ahistorical technoscientific practice, but it absorbs previous social histories of land use, community place-making, and stories of land-grabbing and displacement. Understanding previous environmental histories of agro-industrial development reveals how novel carbon accounting efforts deliver nature to new carbon economy flows, but it also evidences the potential shortcomings of these aspirations.

Short abstract:

This paper looks at how data and calculative practices around carbon shape the way forestlands are imagined and appropriates in Northeast India. However, the performativity and success of these practices depend on the state who regulates it through forest and climate policies.

Long abstract:

Over the last decade, there has been a growing interest in reimagining the forested landscapes of Northeast India as carbon sinks, carbon neutral regions, or regions with abundant carbon stocks. This is reflected in reports like the State of Forest Report (2021) released by the Forest Survey of India (FSI) which show that the region accounts for 28.87 percent of India’s total available forest carbon stock. Seen within the climate change context, an emphasis on such calculations and numerical figures signal the reorganisation [in meanings and use] of forestlands by the government to align with India’s global climate commitments. This paper engages with discussions around the performative nature of data and calculative practices around carbon that shape the way forests are resignified within the discourse of climate change mitigation. It argues that imageries guided by calculations and numerical figures have the potential to resignify land, thus repurposing them for different uses. However, it requires socio-political networks to appropriate it on the ground. Drawing on findings from my fieldwork in Nagaland, it is seen that the performativity of data to change material meanings of forest depends on the acceptance of the state government and its recommendation through policies. Unless the government produces rules and regulations to initiate new modalities of forest carbon on the ground, these resignification remains unchanged. Furthermore, the performative nature of data and accounting practices encourage communities to study and perform rural development within the framework monetising forests through carbon (as observed in the ground).

Short abstract:

This paper examines current commensuration practices for agri-food system emissions in national long-term climate plans based on UNFCCC inventory rules. It argues that these practices hinder mitigation accountability, with strong implications for global climate justice.

Long abstract:

This paper delves into the concept of residual emissions (RE) within sectoral carbon accounting, focusing on the agri-food sector. Residual emissions, commonly regarded as hard-to-abate and necessitating compensation through carbon sinks, lack a consistent definition in long term climate strategies (LT-LEDs) and beyond (Buck et al. 2023). Despite this, many countries quantify sectoral residual emissions using UNFCCC inventory rules, which, for agriculture, creates a separation between agricultural emissions and those from directly related categories such as energy and land use.

We examine current commensuration practices in LT-LEDs to shed light on their implications for mitigation accountability and global climate justice. Three main implications are discussed. First, accounting for carbon emissions from a national production perspective overlooks consumption politics, creating risks of emissions leakage from high-consuming countries compensating national decarbonization with high-emissions imports. Second, separating agriculture from related accounting categories obscures emissions embedded in inputs for industrial farming (such as fertilizers, pesticides, and imported animal feed), undervaluing mitigation options whose indirect emissions reductions would count elsewhere. Third, treating biotic agricultural carbon sinks as permanent and fungible with other forms of carbon removal poses significant risks to the long-term credibility of mitigation efforts and claims.

The paper argues that current accounting practices co-produce fragmented national policy approaches to governing agri-food systems, hindering mitigation accountability and the adoption of system-based perspectives and alternative methodologies. It concludes by discussing alternative foresight exercises and commensuration practices to enable the development of national mitigation pledges in line with climate justice principles.