#POLLEN24 – Call for papers on “Political Ecologies of carbon removal, net zero and climate delay”

POLLEN24 in Lund invites abstracts for papers that address the emerging political ecologies of carbon removal in its variety of emerging forms.  More information about this CfP, including its rationale,…

POLLEN24 in Lund invites abstracts for papers that address the emerging political ecologies of carbon removal in its variety of emerging forms.  More information about this CfP, including its rationale, deadline, and contacts below.

Call for Papers – POLLEN 2024 CDR Stream

CfP POLLEN24 – 10-12 June 2024, Lund- Sweden

The climate conversation has in recent years moved towards a new framing: Countries, municipalities, and various private actors have adopted ‘net zero’ as the new master narrative of global climate governance. Under this narrative, actors promise to balance out any remaining emissions with removals at some point in the future, including through reliance on new market mechanisms, offsetting methodologies, and the scaling of novel removal technologies. These developments raise all kinds of important questions about how this will be done, with what local and global implications, and who is set to lose/benefit in the process.

Political ecologists have only just begun to engage in the ongoing net zero and carbon removal conversation, for instance raising concerns about untenable demands on land use (Dooley et al., 2022) and a potential ‘rescaling’ of the global land rush in the global South (Bluwstein and Cavanagh, 2022). But there is much that the field could contribute to the debate. There is for instance a long history of research in political ecology on carbon sinks, carbon offsets, and REDD+, much of which engages with carbon removal in all but its name (Carton et al., 2020). Insights from decades of research on conservation (Büscher and Fletcher, 2020; Holmes and Cavanagh, 2016), green grabbing (Fairhead et al., 2012), and neoliberal climate governance (Leach and Scoones, 2015; McAfee, 1999, 2012; McAfee and Shapiro, 2010) more generally also appear directly relevant for understanding and scrutinizing current developments.

Currently, this kind of research is often framed out of discussions on carbon removal, which tend to take place in academic, corporate and policy circles where political ecology insights and political ecologists are, for now, relatively absent. Key questions therefore are: What is actually new here, and what is not? To what extent does the net zero and carbon removal turn in climate politics create a different set of concerns, conditions and obstacles for climate justice and effective mitigation? What can we learn from previous political ecology scholarship on these questions? How does the apparent rescaling of long-standing concerns raise the stakes for critical scholarship? And how can political ecologists critically engage academic and policy circles where net zero and carbon removal ideas and futures are set out?

At POLLEN24 in Lund, we hope to bring together the political ecology community working on these topics and create a space for exchange and dialogue on what critical engagement with carbon removal and net zero could (and should) look like. With this aim in mind, we are inviting abstracts for papers that address the emerging political ecologies of carbon removal in its variety of emerging forms. Submitted abstracts could be focused on one of the following topics – but we welcome other ideas as well:

  • How some places and ways of life are being reimagined and/or transformed, while others are not, because of specific carbon removal projects;
  • What global and local environmental injustices arise as a consequence of how net zero and carbon removal plans are formed, or how they are (proposed to be) governed;
  • How carbon offset markets are (not) being transformed to allow for carbon removals, and what this entails for long-standing critiques of such markets (Haya et al. 2023);
  • What forms of delay, deterrence and obstruction emerge as a consequence of particular carbon removal promises and investments (Carton et al., 2023); and in what way such delays differ from those that can be identified with other mitigation technologies (hydrogen, CCS, modular nuclear, etc.)
  • How (climate) science is invoked to obscure the politics of climate mitigation strategies by various actors (Tilsted et al., 2023), and what futures are promoted and effaced as a result (Lund et al., 2023);
  • How carbon removal is evoked and made legible and reasonable through various practices, technologies and ways of knowing;
  • What networks of political interest and financial support are driving carbon removal and net zero agendas and;
  • What, if anything, is new in the current discussion on carbon removal, and what we can learn from previous research on carbon sinks, carbon offsetting, the clean development mechanism, etc;
  • What examples and prospects exist, or can be imagined, for ‘just’ or ‘right-sized’ carbon removal.

You can find more detailed information about this Call for Papers in this link.

Abstracts should be around 200 words and should be submitted by email, by 1 December to Wim Carton (wim.carton@lucsus.lu.se), Jens Friis Lund (jens@ifro.ku.dk) and Kirstine Lund Christiansen (klc@ifro.ku.dk)

References

Bluwstein, J. and C. Cavanagh (2022) ‘Rescaling the land rush ? Global political ecologies of land use and cover change in key scenario archetypes for achieving the 1 . 5 ° C Paris agreement target’. The Journal of Peasant Studies: 1–33.

Büscher, B. and R. Fletcher (2020) The Conservation Revolution: Radical Ideas for Saving Nature Beyond the Anthropocene. London: Verso.

Carton, W., A. Asiyanbi, S. Beck, et al. (2020) ‘Negative emissions and the long history of carbon removal’. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 11(6): 1–25.

Carton, W., I.M. Hougaard, N. Markusson, et al. (2023) ‘Is carbon removal delaying emission reductions?’. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change

Dooley, K., H. Keith, A. Larson, et al. (2022) ‘The Land Gap Report’.

Fairhead, J., M. Leach and I. Scoones (2012) ‘Green Grabbing: a new appropriation of nature?’. The Journal of Peasant Studies 39(2): 237–61.

Haya, B. K., Alford-Jones, K., Anderegg, W. R. L., Beymer-Farris, B., Blanchard, L., Bomfim, B., Chin, D., Evans, S., Hogan, M., Holm, J. A., McAfee, K., So, I. S., West, T. A. P., & Withey, L. (2023, September 15). Quality assessment of REDD+ carbon credit projects. Berkeley Carbon Trading Project. https://gspp.berkeley.edu/research-and-impact/centers/cepp/projects/berkeley-carbontrading-project/REDD+

Holmes, G. and C.J. Cavanagh (2016) ‘A review of the social impacts of neoliberal conservation: Formations, inequalities, contestations’. Geoforum 75. Elsevier Ltd: 199–209.

Leach, M. and I. Scoones (2015) Carbon Conflicts and Forest Landscapes in Africa. Leach, M. and I. Scoones (eds). New York: Routledge.

Lund, J.F., N. Markusson, W. Carton, et al. (2023) ‘Net zero and the unexplored politics of residual emissions’. Energy Research & Social Science 98(September 2022). Elsevier Ltd: 103035.

McAfee, K. (1999) ‘Selling nature to save it? Biodiversity and green developmentalism’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 17(2): 133–154.

McAfee, K. (2012) ‘The Contradictory Logic of Global Ecosystem Services Markets’. Development and Change 43(1): 105–31.

McAfee, K. and E.N. Shapiro (2010) ‘Payments for Ecosystem Services in Mexico : Nature , Neoliberalism, Social Movements, and the State’. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 100(3): 579–99.

Tilsted, J.P., E. Palm, A. Bjørn, et al. (2023) ‘Corporate climate futures in the making: Why we need research on the politics of Science-Based Targets’. Energy Research &Social Science 103(July).