Contribution short abstract

My contribution focuses on how carbon forestry turns West African forests into climate capital, linking colonial and contemporary resource regimes. It shows how racial logics shape market-based climate management, reproducing inequalities under the guise of decarbonization.

Contribution long abstract

My chapter contribution to the edited volume The Political Ecologies of Forests in West Africa delineates how the transformation of West African forests into climate capital is mediated through carbon forestry. By crafting a post-colonial political ecology perspective, it traces the continuum of resource-use ethic between colonial forestry—anchored in the commodification of timber—and carbon forestry—premised on the monetization of carbon units. It shows how both relate to the history of environmentalism, and particularly the late nineteenth-century recognition of environmental degradation as a corollary of Civilization. Reflecting on forestry and development policies from the late 1920s onwards, the chapter identifies the persistence of an epistemologically inflected relationality between racial difference and inefficient/deficient environmental utilization in today’s market-based climate management. It explicates how the valorization of forests as carbon sinks is predicated on a historically conditioned and speculatively demarcated racialized sense of crisis and mobilized as a mechanism for generating climate finance, constituting another iteration in the long history of dependent development. In the absence of alternative climate finance, forests become instruments of decarbonization that secure Northern mitigation through Southern appropriation while reproducing structural inequalities. Exposing these patterns, the chapter highlights the missing link between decarbonization and decolonization, showing how development imperatives centering climate finance perpetuate historical patterns of dispossession and racialization.