English Français
Dans le cadre des séminaires de recherche du laboratoire, le Laboratoire d'anthropologie culturelle et sociale (LACS) a le plaisir d'accueillir Diego Silva Garzón, Centre for International Environmental Studies, IHEID, Geneva.
Abstract: Carbon prospecting: navigating the competitive landscape of Nature-based solutions in Colombia
Recent years have witnessed a rise in nature-based solutions as a policy response to climate change. These initiatives include mitigation projects aimed at reducing deforestation and forest degradation (known as REDD+), as well as promoting diverse agrarian practices to achieve carbon emission reductions. As a result, land and land-use practices are becoming increasingly significant in compliance and voluntary carbon markets, where avoided and removed carbon emissions are converted into tradable carbon credits that different actors buy to further their mitigation efforts.
Yet, beneath the surface of these ambitious initiatives lies a complex reality. Despite the existence of carbon standards designed to ensure the quality, integrity, and additionality of Nature-based mitigation projects, local project developers often reinterpret guidelines and regulations in ways that are economically advantageous for themselves. Drawing on ethnographic work conducted among farmers and mitigation project developers in Colombia, I examine one such strategy: the prospecting of existing agricultural plantations that meet certain criteria, allowing project developers to repurpose them as carbon mitigation projects. Through this practice, project developers replace the substantial effort of initiating new agricultural projects from scratch with the semiotic labor of reconstructing the plantations' agricultural history to meet quality-assurance standards. This analysis raises questions about the additionality of agricultural mitigation projects in Colombia, as well as the forms of labor, value, and competition that emerge as project developers attempt to translate existing crops into carbon credits.