Carbon Trapping: Climate Mitigation and Indigenous Resistance in Vanuatu
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2024
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On March 26, 2016 Hannington Tate, Vanuatu’s Director of the Forestry Department, declared three interrelated initiatives: an annual Tree Planting Day and Forest Week; as well as the ongoing Decade of Reforestation. Yet, Vanuatu’s forests are not considered to be at great risk of deforestation; the Global Forest Resource Assessment records a deforestation rate of 0% in Vanuatu. Yet, this rate obscures complex historical and present currents of forest change. As Vanuatu’s leaders consider reforestation key to their approach to adaptation, mitigation, and development, reforestation is also linked to a global movement towards carbon offsetting, a much-debated natural climate solution that leverages ecosystems and their associated services to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while also addressing societal challenges. As the global scientific community debates the effectiveness of tree-planting for carbon sequestration with discouraging results, political ecologists highlight the unintended social consequences of these programs locally, documenting increased livelihood precarity and elite capture of benefits at the local scale and the creation of new opportunities for accumulation and pollution at the global scale. Alternatively, scholars of science and technology studies reveal how science transforms in service of capital through payments-for-ecosystems services schemes with impacts on environments (in)visible to capital. Common to these frameworks is an attention to history, power, and the relationship between environmental knowledge and governance. Yet, these scholarly frameworks take the arrival of NCS for granted, failing to account for how nations struggle to access funding and must transform to become fundable, and are not well tailored to Pacific Islands contexts and histories. This dissertation leverages a place-based, qualitative, ethnographic research methodology enriched by frameworks in Pacific Islands Studies to contextualize island histories and the impacts of successive waves of colonization and extractions amidst climate mitigation programs. As communities in Vanuatu are planting and protecting trees for the long-awaited arrival of climate finance for adaptation and mitigation, new landscapes, economies, and social relations are brought into being with significant implications for carbon accounting and social justice. Through a multi-sited, patchy ethnography exploring the (un)making of carbon offsets in Vanuatu, insights are generated into the uneven production of s/pacific places through global climate policies, the socio-ecological implications of enterprising nature, the influence of history and colonialism on current climate governance, as well as the possibilities of Indigenous alternatives and home-grown solutions to climate change.
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Geography, Pacific Rim studies, Carbon Offset, Climate Mitigation, Pacific Islands Studies, Political Ecology, Vanuatu
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162 pages
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