Carbon Conflicts and Forest Landscapes in Africa

This book examines the effectiveness of forest carbon projects in Africa, looking at efforts to conserve forest carbon stocks, reduce carbon emissions and offset emissions through trade in carbon credits. Drawing on a diverse range of original international case studies, the book analyses forest carbon projects in the context of the wider commoditisation of nature. It explores how these projects interact with the particular histories of forest landscapes and impact on local forest users. By examining these cases in a comparative framework, the book provides a rich and compelling account of how and why carbon conflicts are emerging, and how they might be avoided in future.

Amidst the pressing challenges of global climate change, the last decade has seen a wave of forest carbon projects across the world, designed to conserve and enhance forest carbon stocks in order to reduce carbon emissions from deforestation and offset emissions elsewhere. Exploring a set of new empirical case studies, Carbon Conflicts and Forest Landscapes in Africa examines how these projects are unfolding, their effects, and who is gaining and losing. Situating forest carbon approaches as part of more general moves to address environmental problems by attaching market values to nature and ecosystems, it examines how new projects interact with forest landscapes and their longer histories of intervention. The book asks: what difference does carbon make? What political and ecological dynamics are unleashed by these new commodified, marketized approaches, and how are local forest users experiencing and responding to them?

The book’s case studies cover a wide range of African ecologies, project types and national political-economic contexts. By examining these cases in a comparative framework and within an understanding of the national, regional and global institutional arrangements shaping forest carbon commoditisation, the book provides a rich and compelling account of how and why carbon conflicts are emerging, and how they might be avoided in future.

This book will be of interest to students of development studies, environmental sciences, geography, economics, development studies and anthropology, as well as practitioners and policy makers.