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SUMMARY:A game of semantics: a political ecology of Kenya's tree planting 
 targets and forest metrics - Alasdair Neilson\, Cambridge University
DTSTART:20221025T120000Z
DTEND:20221025T130000Z
UID:TALK183650@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Valerio Donfrancesco
DESCRIPTION:Tree planting targets and forest metrics have become increasin
 gly important in global forest governance\, yet political ecologists have 
 shown how they are constructed and how they are wielded as a form of power
  can be problematic. In this talk\, I unpack Kenya’s 10 per cent tree/fo
 rest cover target\, which was enshrined into the Kenyan constitution in 20
 10\, and has since become a focal point for national tree planting and eve
 n broader environmental policy. I will show that the target is fundamental
 ly arbitrary and track how it has been produced and reproduced by various 
 actors since colonial times. I then unpack the wording of the target to un
 derstand what actually counts towards its achievement. Here I show how for
 est cover and tree cover are used interchangeably\, causing confusion as t
 o what exactly the target means. Next\, I look at the problems with measur
 ing both forest and tree cover in Kenya. The former is laden with issues o
 f varying opaque definitions and datasets\, whilst the latter lacks any cl
 ear definition or dataset. Lastly\, I unpack the impact of arbitrary tree-
 planting targets and opaque metrics to show how actors can stack varying f
 orest metrics on top of one another to demonstrate that they are meeting t
 he 10 per cent target.
LOCATION:https://zoom.us/j/8314166462
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