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SUMMARY:Who can afford (not) to mitigate? Agency\, inequality\, and additi
 onality in agricultural carbon finance - Connor Joseph Cavanagh Norwegian 
 University of Life Sciences (NMBU)
DTSTART:20190507T120000Z
DTEND:20190507T130000Z
UID:TALK124030@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Peadar Brehony
DESCRIPTION:This seminar presentation explores the uneven geographies and 
 political ecologies of agricultural carbon finance\, understood as incipie
 nt efforts to source certified emissions reductions from mitigation activi
 ties at the landscape scale or agriculture-forest interface. In short\, ef
 forts to assemble emissions reductions in this context result in a notable
  convergence between longstanding concerns in the political ecology of agr
 iculture with more recent debates about the environmental (in)justices of 
 both climate change and its mitigation. At least since Piers Blaikie’s P
 olitical Economy of Soil Erosion in Developing Countries\, for instance\, 
 political ecologists have often sought to challenge prevailing explanation
 s for alleged soil erosion or ‘land degradation’\, and particularly th
 ose which appear to rely on neo-Malthusian narratives of over-population a
 nd intransigent local persistence with ostensibly sub-optimal land managem
 ent practices. Simply put\, project designs for agricultural carbon financ
 e once again bring these debates squarely to the fore\, given that they mu
 st explicitly articulate an explanation for land degradation – and thus 
 potential for enhanced carbon sequestration or other emissions reductions 
 – in order to establish the ‘additionality’ of a proposed interventi
 on within a given project area. With reference to preliminary results from
  ongoing fieldwork in East Africa\, the seminar presentation seeks to nuan
 ce our understanding of additionality in such contexts by foregrounding th
 e oft-unacknowledged or disavowed significance of growing agrarian inequal
 ities within such project designs\, as well as the politics of knowledge a
 nd expertise which underpins their formulation\, development\, and dissemi
 nation within the nascent mitigation-industrial complex. 
LOCATION:Hardy Building 101 (first floor)\, Downing Site\, Cambridge
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