Counting carbon: the shaping of low-carbon landscapes and environmental justice in Colombia

The promises held by the calculation and valuation of carbon emissions have fueled international efforts to standardize carbon-accounting methodologies through frameworks such as the IPCC guidelines, the GHG Protocol and ISO rules[1-3]. Carbon-accounting is however, more than just a calculating and valuation effort. It is a technoscientific object that reconfigures local realities. It reduces the multiple relations that lie behind the production of carbon emissions into a commensurable substance units of CO2 equivalent[4-6], that are used to measure emissions across highly different localities. This is problematic because, although carbon emissions have become a ¿common denominator for thinking about social life in relation to the environment¿[7], this denominator is rendered uncommoned by the uneven histories of oppression and dispossession behind the production of climate change[8]. Moreover, carbon-accounting reconfigures local landscapes by re-organizing ecosystems and economic activities to render them amenable to quantification[9].It is therefore important to go beyond the conceptual analysis of how carbon-accounting frames climate action, to analyze the way in which it affects socio-environmental relations, transforming and/or reproducing existing environmental injustices[10-13]. The new relations that emerge from the introduction of these quantifying infrastructures could promote ways of governing rural populations, stripping them from their productive autonomy and territorial control, while turning ecosystem relations into commodified landscapes reframed as `natural capital or `ecosystem services[14]. In contrast, as hoped by the coming Colombian government, climate action could promote peaceful territorial relations in places affected by decades of war and socio-environmental violence[15]. For many indigenous and peasant communities, NBS programs such as Visión Amazonía and Biocarbono, may not solve structural environmental injustices but provide an opportunity to protect their territories from large-scale mining and agricultural extractivist projects.This project considers the risks and opportunities of climate action for the promotion of peace and environmental justice in Colombia. Although there are risk assessment studies associated with mitigation initiatives and that propose measures to minimize them[16-17], these studies usually reproduce the nature/society metabolic rift[18]. They address carbon emissions as a homogenous abstraction and an output to be reduced, not as a socio-environmental relation inherent to capitalist production. In other words, carbon-accounting is not seen as an environment-making process that helps to create what it is intended to mitigate carbon emissions as a technoscientific object of intervention. Instead, it is treated as a neutral form of knowledge and series of practices, whose risks are perceived as unintended externalities[19]. In contrast, our project studies carbon-accounting as a landscape-making effort[20-21] that reconfigures socio-environmental relations in ways that can decrease and/or exacerbate socio-environmental injustice. We ask three interrelated questions:Q1: How are climate action initiatives trying to create low-carbon landscapes in Colombia through particular assemblages of human and more-than-human actors? Q2: How is the governance of these assemblages carried out, and what is the role of local populations and more-than-human actors (such as forests and soils) in these initiatives? Q3: How and when do these new configurations promote peace and environmental justice, and/or the continuation of neo-extractivist practices that affect communities and ecosystems?