Nature-Based Solutions: New Hope for Nature or New Cover for Colonialism?

Keywords: climate, conservation, carbon markets, REDD+, colonialism
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 02:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 03:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 66

Abstract

So-called nature-based solutions (NBS) – projects and market incentives to promote carbon sequestration by forests, farms, grasslands, and wetlands – are making climate-policy headlines, praised by UN agencies, climate modelers, biodiversity treaty negotiators, Big Green NGOs, carbon-project entrepreneurs, and now global financial speculators eyeing carbon-market profits. This discovery of NBS as putative climate solution is often linked to calls by conservationists to exclude 30 or even 50 percent of the earth’s land area from human activity, a goal denounced by social-science critics and global justice activists as the latest model of colonialism and dispossession of rural food producers. Anthropogenic carbon sequestration is not new – peasants have created carbon-rich soils for centuries – and attention to the policies that promote or prevent climate-mitigating land use is welcome. But despite their promises of safeguards and science-based best practices, most NBS proposals fail to consider why two decades for programs based on similar purposes and premises – REDD+ and other payment for ecosystem services projects – have brought no measurable climate-mitigation gains, minimal benefits and frequent harms to affected communities, and complete failure to reign in the export plantations and the other extractive industries that drive ecosystem destruction. And, implicit in many versions of NBS is the idea that they can reduce or postpone the need for rapid decarbonization. This is especially true of public pledges by corporations to achieve net-zero emissions by means that typically entail offsetting continued emissions and fossil-fuel extraction by the same companies.