Carbon stock indicators: reductionist assessments and contentious policies on land use

ABSTRACT

Indicators of carbon storage in forests and other land uses have gained much prominence to evaluate and endorse land-based climate change mitigation policies. The outcomes of such assessments can have direct livelihood implications for dwellers living at the forest–agriculture frontier, such as shifting cultivators or subsistence farmers. This contribution critically discusses the methodological relevance of carbon stock indicators to assess long-term emission dynamics of land uses, and furthermore addresses the ‘politics of measurement’ that can be involved in policy practice. From a complex socio-ecological systems perspective, the paper argues that carbon stock indicators provide necessary but not sufficient information to endorse land use policies with mitigation aims. While they may indicate one-off sequestration gains through vegetation and land-use change, they cannot account for permanent hidden emissions that emerge as part of the broader agrarian transitions that accompany land-use change. Over the long term, this may render related mitigation interventions ineffective, if not counterproductive. Furthermore, carbon stock estimates for future land-use scenarios sometimes draw on biased assumptions, or are constructed within histories of discrimination, through which they may further marginalize subaltern groups such as shifting cultivators. A paradigm shift is needed that includes more integrative assessment approaches.

KEYWORDS:

• Carbon stock indicators
• politics of measurement
• climate change mitigation
• agrarian transition
• shifting cultivation
• REDD+

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the members of the MOSAIC network for helpful discussions, and Simone Gingrich and Courtney Work for constructive comments on drafts. An earlier version was presented in November 2016 at the LandAC conference in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Three anonymous reviewers provided constructive and challenging comments that helped me to improve the paper for this journal. All shortcomings remain my own responsibility.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Arnim Scheidel has been a post-doctoral fellow at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), The Hague, and a researcher at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA), Barcelona. Currently, his research focuses on land conflicts induced by climate change mitigation policies. His general interests include ecological economics, rural change and political ecology of development, with a geographical focus on Southeast Asia and Europe. Email: [email protected]

ORCID

Arnim Scheidel http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9764-685X

Notes

1 REDD+ refers to Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in developing countries, including the role of sustainable forest management and conservation.

2 Note that while the paper’s argument is not restricted to a geographic region, much of the discussion is informed by past and present research on the small-farming economy in Southeast Asia.

3 Ziegler et al. (2012) defined fallows of five to 10 years as intermediate, and fallows of 10–25+ years as long fallow systems, while Dressler et al. (2016) recently used a five-year threshold to distinguish between short- and long-fallow systems.

4 Carbon stock data were generally estimated as ‘time-averaged’, in terms of the average amount of carbon stored per hectare in a given land-use system over a given rotation time. This allows accounting for the CO₂ sequestration potential of systems with different rotation lengths.

5 For instance, CDM A/R projects are primarily assessed in terms of their potential ecosystem carbon gains (CO₂ sequestration). Only those emissions that relate to biomass burning, e.g. for field preparation, need to be accounted, and not those project emissions that result from fossil fuel use for machinery, production and application of synthetic fertilizers, infrastructure development and the like (UNFCCC 2013).

6 A popular example of how different system representations yield different conclusions on its identity is the Indian parable of the elephant and the blind men touching various parts of it. The first blind man, touching the trunk, says it’s a big snake. The second blind man, touching the foot, says it’s a trunk of a tree. The third blind man, touching the ear, says it is a big piece of leather. The parable evokes the idea that someone cannot understand the whole through only looking at some parts of the whole.

7 Note that another strategy to counter land loss would be increased use of or encroachment on new forest areas elsewhere, which has been described under the term ‘leakage’ (Angelsen 2008). In such cases, carbon emissions saved through forest regrowth in one area would need to be weighed against forest carbon lost elsewhere through leakage, which can be substantial; see Murray, McCarl, and Lee 2004.

8 Incomes received through REDD+ payments, financed by globally traded carbon offsets, do not necessarily change these dynamics, but can further deepen the integration of forest communities into the global, fossil-fueled economy. They may foster the replacement of local environmental, and hence ‘renewable’, incomes obtained from forests, by ‘fossil-fueled incomes’ obtained from an unstable global carbon market, financed by the polluting industries of the global North (cf. Corbera and Martin 2015).

9 In CDM A/R projects, these assumptions are required for assuring ‘additionality’ of carbon sequestration (UNFCCC 2013).

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the Catalan Agency for Management of University and Research Grants (AGAUR – Agència de Gestió d’Ajuts Universitaris i de Recerca) through a Beatriu de Pinós research grant [2014 BP_A 00129]. It was developed within the MOSAIC research project and network, to which it aims to contribute. MOSAIC is funded through NWO and DFID through the CCMCC (Conflict and Cooperation in the Management of Climate Change) Integrated Project.