Dissertation
Carbon Trapping: The Political Ecology of Forest Carbon Offsetting in Vanuatu
Carbon offsetting, particularly forest-based carbon sequestration, continues to be the darling of global climate action with over $5.2 billion expended on the flagship UN REDD+ program since 2008. Yet, for a decade scholars have articulated the failures of REDD+ to meet sustainable development and carbon removal goals. In spite of this widespread criticism, forest-based carbon offset funding continues to grow and remains central to climate financing in the Global North and climate mitigation in the Global Majority. However, the failures of carbon offsetting are not only in outcome but also in distribution–Vanuatu struggles to access funding despite being the most at-risk nation in the world according to the UN WorldRiskIndex. At the same time, the Vanuatu Government views carbon offsetting as a key strategy for climate adaptation and mitigation. With carbon offsetting becoming increasingly entrenched in global climate action as well as climate policy in Vanuatu, and increasingly controversial, I question: to what extent does carbon offsetting deliver social and ecological benefits in Vanuatu?
Collaborators
Dr. Krishna Kumar Kotra, Science Program Coordinator, University of the South Pacific Emalus
Funding
Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Award for Vanuatu
(2020)
Committee
Dr. Mary Mostafanezhad (Chair), Department of Geography and Environment, University of Hawaiʻi
Dr. Krisna Suryanata, Department of Geography and Environment, University of Hawaiʻi
Dr. Alex Mawyer, Center for Pacific Island Studies, University of Hawaiʻi
Dr. Aya Kimura, Department of Sociology, University of Hawaiʻi
Dr. Lisa Kelley, Department of Geography and Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado
Chapter Outline
Chapter 1: Climate Change as Redistribution: Constructing Climate Interventions in Vanuatu
Chapter 2: Locating Deforestation: Critical Physical Geography of Land-Use Cover Change in Santo
Chapter 3: When trickle down didn’t trickle in: Accessing Climate Finance in Vanuatu
Chapter 4: Trapping Carbon or Carbon Trapped? Analyzing Carbon-Offsetting on Santo
Conclusions
Theoretical Frameworks
Political Ecology
Political ecologists have asserted how carbon offsetting projects are power laden, replicating the pitfalls of previous development paradigms that prioritized Western understandings of both nature and development over Indigenous knowledge systems (Escobar 1998). Indeed, Beymer-Farris and Bassett (2012) and Asiyanbi (2016) find climate interventions alter property rights and resource access, leading to new forms of militarized resource protectionism and increased precarity in REDD+ communities. As natures becomes commodified into new sites for accumulation, new forms of exclusion emerge to the detriment to those most vulnerable.
Pacific Island Studies
The origins of REDD+, the dominant climate finance mechanism at present and focus of this research project, can be traced to conversations between Papua New Guinea’s Michael Somare and a young American working in finance, Kevin Conrad in 2003 (Lang 2017). Climate interventions themselves are thus both from within and outside the Pacific. These projects have thus always been hybrid, navigating between the desires of high emitting nations and the low emitting nations, between development and justice. Hybridity has a long history in the Pacific; as T. Teaiwa (2001) has written, “The native is hybrid. Hybridity is essential. For the edge” (344). My research seeks to acknowledge this hybridity, incorporating the multiply-situated perspectives of politicians, chiefs, nonprofit workers, and individuals as they seek and evaluate climate finance.