Advocating afforestation, betting on BECCS: land-based negative emissions technologies (NETs) and agrarian livelihoods in the global South

ABSTRACT

Negative emissions technologies (NETs) for carbon dioxide removal (CDR) are increasingly important responses to achieve global climate change targets, but to date, there has been insufficient attention to land-based NETs (including afforestation, biochar, and other measures) as an agrarian challenge for the global South. This paper explores the implications of different NETs for land, labor, capital, and politics in rural spaces and contributes to articulating agrarian climate justice by demonstrating the potentially unjust implications of many NETs. The paper concludes with how these measures might be designed to be less negative for rural peoples in future implementation.

KEYWORDS:

• Carbon dioxide removal (CDR)
• geoengineering
• bioenergy
• climate mitigation
• carbon markets
• forestry

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank colleagues who worked with me on the IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Land for stimulating some of the thoughts in this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For example, the IPCC 1.5 report has only one modeled pathway (P1) with no use of BECCS: this pathway requires very low energy demand (LED), rapid phase-out of fossil fuels and/or rapid shifts to sustainable food consumption freeing up land for afforestation (IPCC 2018, 122). Other modeled pathways all rely on NETs of some kind.

2 For example, land-based NETs are often presented as providing co-benefits (e.g. forest ecosystem services, increased agricultural productivity, or electricity) with fewer negative trade-offs (Smith et al. 2019). A 2015 National Academy of Sciences report stated that land-based NETs raise fewer ethical issues as compared to others like ocean fertilization or solar radiation management (NAS 2015).

3 Biofuels are not considered a NET, as they are primarily a substitute for fossil fuels and thus a mitigation strategy. REDD+ occupies a more ambiguous position as both a mitigation strategy to reduce forest emissions from deforestation (avoided emissions), as well as a possible NET for negative emissions if forest cover expands (increased carbon sink). In general, existing natural forest sinks should not be counted as NETs, because they are already calculated in global carbon balance estimates (Nolan, Field, and Mach 2021).

4 Albedo effects result from planting (darker) trees on (lighter) lands in northern regions, which contributes to increased solar radiation absorption and localized warming, and thus offsets the benefits of tree planting in terms of global temperature (IPCC 2018).

5 For example, existing literature has examined community acceptance or opposition of existing energy and climate projects as a proxy for possible reactions to NETs (Buck 2018).

6 As of 2017, total world land use for agriculture and forestry was 7130 Mha (2429 Mha for forests, 1426 Mha for agriculture, and 3275 Mha of grasslands (for livestock)) (NAS 2019).

7 Databases of current and proposed land deals indicate that 3.6 million hectares have been acquired for biofuels, mostly in Africa and Latin America (with no landgrabs in Europe or North America), while large-scale land deals for all types of forestry have affected 31.7 million ha, with many in Eastern Europe/Russia (LandPortal data).

8 See https://stripe.com/blog/first-negative-emissions-purchases.

Additional information

Funding

The work for this paper was funded in part by a National Science Foundation grant #1853759 on Understanding the Use of Ecosystem Services Concepts in Policy.

Notes on contributors

Pamela McElwee

Pamela McElwee is a Professor of Human Ecology at Rutgers University. McElwee's research focuses on strategies for climate mitigation, ecosystem services valuation, and biodiversity conservation, and she has conducted extensive fieldwork in Southeast Asia. She holds a joint Ph.D. in anthropology and forestry and has served as lead author for both the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).