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Short abstract:

Soils and land(use) are increasingly featuring in the climate debate and politics internationally and nationally. This contribution reflects on shifting society-soil relations in Norway today in the light of environmental knowledge production and policies.

Long abstract:

Soils, grounds and lands are increasingly treated as climatic actors in environmental knowledge production and policies. In Norway, a recent ban on cultivation of virgin peatlands was made on the grounds that these land types contain a vast amount of carbon and cultivation would interfere with governmental commitments to reduce national anthropogenic greenhouse gass emissions. For many Norwegian farmers, the ban created a sense of invasion into their landownership rights and their right to drain and cultivate peatlands into arable soil, infringing upon their economic flexibility. At the same time, agricultural soils are highlighted internationally as having major capacity for carbon capture and sequestration through practices such as specific grazing management and changing farming techniques.

In contrast to the protection of virgin peatlands, agricultural soils and their carbon storage abilities are more difficult to model or quantify. Since 2020, all farmers in Norway are encouraged to use a climate calculator to take control of their farm's greenhouse gas emissions. Yet soils, consisting of a multiplicity of multispecies relations, resist this standardisation. In this contribution I look closer at the emerging understanding of soil as a container for carbon, a terrestrial sink. Through discourse analysis, readings of scientific literature and media outlets, and interviews with agricultural and climate advisors in Norway, I explore the implications of this new way of relating to soils and land, and ask what is rendered invisible when framing soils and grounds as a climate frontier.