Esteve Corbera

Bioenergy and climate change mitigation: an assessment

Bioenergy deployment offers significant potential for climate change mitigation, but also carries considerable risks. In this review, we bring together perspectives of various communities involved in the research and regulation of bioenergy deployment in the context of climate change mitigation: Land‐use and energy experts, land‐use and integrated assessment modelers, human geographers, ecosystem researchers, climate scientists and two different strands of life‐cycle assessment experts. We summarize technological options, outline the state‐of‐the‐art knowledge on various climate effects, provide an update on estimates of technical resource potential and comprehensively identify sustainability effects. Cellulosic feedstocks, increased end‐use efficiency, improved land carbon‐stock management and residue use, and, when fully developed, BECCS appear as the most promising options, depending on development costs, implementation, learning, and risk management. Combined heat and power, efficient biomass cookstoves and small‐scale power generation for rural areas can help to promote energy access and sustainable development, along with reduced emissions. We estimate the sustainable technical potential as up to 100 EJ: high agreement; 100–300 EJ: medium agreement; above 300 EJ: low agreement. Stabilization scenarios indicate that bioenergy may supply from 10 to 245 EJ yr−1 to global primary energy supply by 2050. Models indicate that, if technological and governance preconditions are met, large‐scale deployment (>200 EJ), together with BECCS, could help to keep global warming below 2° degrees of preindustrial levels; but such high deployment of land‐intensive bioenergy feedstocks could also lead to detrimental climate effects, negatively impact ecosystems, biodiversity and livelihoods. The integration of bioenergy systems into agriculture and forest landscapes can improve land and water use efficiency and help address concerns about environmental impacts. We conclude that the high variability in pathways, uncertainties in technological development and ambiguity in political decision render forecasts on deployment levels and climate effects very difficult. However, uncertainty about projections should not preclude pursuing beneficial bioenergy options.

Exploring equity and sustainable development in the new carbon economy

Abstract Ambitious claims have been made about the development benefits of market-based policy instruments for climate mitigation. We examine the implications of forest carbon projects for different aspects of equity and sustainable development. We apply a stakeholder multi-criteria assessment to explore the range of stakeholders, their roles, interests and perspectives, to a case study in Mexico. Two elements of equity, access to markets and forests, and legitimacy in decision-making and institutions, are discussed. Robust cross-scale institutional frameworks are necessary to ensure that objectives for equity and sustainable development are met and that already marginalised sectors of society are not excluded. These institutions are still developing and their establishment brings together many different stakeholders from government, private sector and civil society. However, the ability of the “new carbon economy” to provide real benefits for sustainable development may ultimately be constrained by the nature of the market itself.

Offsetting Benefits? Analyzing Access to Forest Carbon:

Emissions trading has created new forms of exchangeable property which become commodities when traded in markets designed to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and mitigate climate change. This paper analyzes a set of social processes which influence who benefits from reductions in emissions generated by primary production from forest ecosystems. Informed by commodification literature, and property and access theory, we suggest that farmers and rural communities cannot derive full benefits from carbon sequestration because they lack key structural and relational mechanisms, such as capital, knowledge, expertise, technology, and, in some cases, even labour. We illustrate this argument by examining three ongoing carbon-forestry projects in China, Ecuador, and Mexico and we highlight its implications for future forestry mitigation projects and programmes.

Ecosystem Services: Heed Social Goals

C R E D IT : R O G E R B R A N D T , N P S /W IK IM E D IA C O M M O N S Response CURL MAKES A VALID POINT ABOUT THE BEHAVior of carbonate minerals on multimillionyear time scales. Our interest, though, is in the much shorter time scales of decades to centuries. Considering remaining uncertainties in measuring some aspects of the global carbon cycle and the relatively rapid environmental changes under way in the atmosphere and oceans, quantifying carbon budgets in relevant geological systems for these shorter time periods may be more complicated (1). Our task is to better understand rates and processes associated with mineral weathering and impacts on carbon cycling. C. GROVES,* J. CAO, C. ZHANG Hoffman Environmental Research Institute, Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, KY 42101, USA. International Research Centre on Karst under the auspices of UNESCO and Key Laboratory of Karst Geology, Institute of Karst Geology, Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences, Ministry of Land and Resources, Guilin, Guangxi, 541004, China.

Socially sustainable degrowth as a social–ecological transformation: repoliticizing sustainability

In the late 1980s, the sustainable development paradigm emerged to provide a framework through which economic growth, social welfare and environmental protection could be harmonized. However, more than 30 years later, we can assert that such harmonization has proved elusive. Steffen et al. (2015) have shown that four out of nine planetary boundaries have been crossed: climate change, impacts in biosphere integrity, land-system change and altered biochemical flows are a manifestation that human activities are driving the Earth into a new state of imbalance. Meanwhile, wealth concentration and inequality have increased, particularly during the last 50 years (Piketty 2014). In 2008, the collapse of large financial institutions was prevented by the public bailout of private banks and, nowadays, low growth rates are likely to become the norm in the economic development of mature economies (Summers 2013; IMF 2015; Teulings and Baldwin 2015). The three pillars of sustainability (environment, society and economy) are thus simultaneously threatened by an intertwined crisis. In an attempt to problematize the sustainable development paradigm, and its recent reincarnation in the concept of a ‘‘green economy’’, degrowth emerged as a paradigm that emphasizes that there is a contradiction between sustainability and economic growth (Kothari et al. 2015; Dale et al. 2015). It argues that the pathway towards a sustainable future is to be found in a democratic and redistributive downscaling of the biophysical size of the global economy (Schneider et al. 2010; D’Alisa et al. 2014). In the context of this desired transformation, it becomes imperative to explore ways in which sustainability science can explicitly and effectively address one of the root causes of social and environmental degradation worldwide, namely, the ideology and practice of economic growth. This special feature aims to do so by stressing the deeply contested and political nature of the debates around the prospects, pathways and challenges of a global transformation towards sustainability. The ‘growth’ paradigm (Dale 2012; Purdey 2010) is indeed largely accepted in advanced and developing countries alike as an unquestioned imperative and naturalized need. It escapes ‘the political’, i.e. the contested public terrain where different imaginaries of possible socio-ecological orders compete over the symbolic and material institutionalization of these visions. In this sense, the contemporary context of neoliberal capitalism appears as a post-political space, i.e. a political formation that forecloses the political, the legitimacy of dissenting voices and positions (Swyngedouw 2007). As Swyngedouw (2014:91) argues: ‘‘the public management of things and people is hegemonically articulated around a naturalization of the need of economic growth and capitalism as the only reasonable and possible form of organization of socionatural metabolism. This foreclosure of the political in terms of at least recognizing the legitimacy of dissenting & Viviana Asara viviana.asara@gmail.com

Community-Based Conservation and Traditional Ecological Knowledge: Implications for Social-Ecological Resilience

Our review highlights how traditional ecological knowledge influences peoples adaptive capacity to social- ecological change and identifies a set of mechanisms that contribute to such capacity in the context of community-based biodiversity conservation initiatives. Twenty-three publications, including twenty-nine case studies, were reviewed with the aim of investigating how local knowledge, community-based conservation, and resilience interrelate in social-ecological systems. We highlight that such relationships have not been systematically addressed in regions where a great number of community conservation initiatives are found; and we identify a set of factors that foster peoples adaptive capacity to social-ecological change and a number of social processes that, in contrast, undermine such capacity and the overall resilience of the social- ecological system. We suggest that there is a need to further investigate how climate variability and other events affect the joint evolution of conservation outcomes and traditional ecological knowledge, and there is a need to expand the current focus on social factors to explain changes in traditional ecological knowledge and adaptive capacity towards a broader approach that pays attention to ecosystem dynamics and environmental change.

Large-scale land deals from the inside out: findings from Kenya's Tana Delta

Although there is alarm over the global land rush, many plans for the large-scale transformation of land acquired by investors remain on the drawing board. Based on a study of two land deals in Kenyas Tana Delta, this paper considers the processes by which blueprint designs are amended or delayed through the involvement of local actors. It demonstrates that even top-down acquisition of land by powerful state-linked actors with the support of policy discourse can be stalled by the rural poor, particularly if the latter have strong customary claims and links to wider opposition. At the same time, large-scale land acquisition is not automatically opposed by local people, who may see land deals as an opportunity to safeguard access to resources and to support their development expectations. The paper also suggests that although consultation and the existence of recognised property rights appear to result in fairer project designs, land deals are likely to reflect the decision-making power of an elite that is not fully informed. The conclusion affirms the need for more nuanced, place-based analyses of large-scale land deals, taking into account tenure arrangements, resource access mechanisms, land management discourses and the role of cross-scale agency and alliances in building support for, or opposition to, such deals.

Integrating place-specific livelihood and equity outcomes into global assessments of bioenergy deployment

Integrated assessment models suggest that the large-scale deployment of bioenergy could contribute to ambitious climate change mitigation efforts. However, such a shift would intensify the global competition for land, with possible consequences for 1.5 billion smallholder livelihoods that these models do not consider. Maintaining and enhancing robust livelihoods upon bioenergy deployment is an equally important sustainability goal that warrants greater attention. The social implications of biofuel production are complex, varied and place-specific, difficult to model, operationalize and quantify. However, a rapidly developing body of social science literature is advancing the understanding of these interactions. In this letter we link human geography research on the interaction between biofuel crops and livelihoods in developing countries to integrated assessments on biofuels. We review case-study research focused on first-generation biofuel crops to demonstrate that food, income, land and other assets such as health are key livelihood dimensions that can be impacted by such crops and we highlight how place-specific and global dynamics influence both aggregate and distributional outcomes across these livelihood dimensions. We argue that place-specific production models and land tenure regimes mediate livelihood outcomes, which are also in turn affected by global and regional markets and their resulting equilibrium dynamics. The place-specific perspective suggests that distributional consequences are a crucial complement to aggregate outcomes; this has not been given enough weight in comprehensive assessments to date. By narrowing the gap between place-specific case studies and global models, our discussion offers a route towards integrating livelihood and equity considerations into scenarios of future bioenergy deployment, thus contributing to a key challenge in sustainability sciences.

How effective are biodiversity conservation payments in Mexico

We assess the additional forest cover protected by 13 rural communities located in the southern state of Chiapas, Mexico, as a result of the economic incentives received through the countrys national program of payments for biodiversity conservation. We use spatially explicit data at the intra-community level to define a credible counterfactual of conservation outcomes. We use covariate-matching specifications associated with spatially explicit variables and difference-in-difference estimators to determine the treatment effect. We estimate that the additional conservation represents between 12 and 14.7 percent of forest area enrolled in the program in comparison to control areas. Despite this high degree of additionality, we also observe lack of compliance in some plots participating in the PES program. This lack of compliance casts doubt on the ability of payments alone to guarantee long-term additionality in context of high deforestation rates, even with an augmented program budget or extension of participation to communities not yet enrolled.

When Participatory Forest Management makes money: insights from Tanzania on governance, benefit sharing, and implications for REDD+

Participatory Forest Management (PFM) and the more recent framework for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) are two resource management strategies that were introduced in part for their cobenefits, including forest protection, employment opportunities, and added income for forest adjacent communities. In this paper we examine the early implementation of PFM in Tanzanias Kilwa District, led and promoted by the nongovernmental organisation Mpingo Conservation and Development Initiative (MCDI). This organisation has also recently received support to design a REDD+ project that could potentially realise additional financial benefits for local communities through the sale of carbon offsets in PFM-supported villages. We explore the ways in which MCDI has established a PFM scheme in four villages, how it has supported the emergence of more robust local governance structures, and what villagers perceive to have been the main outcomes and pitfalls of PFM to date. MCDI has managed to reduce many of the challenges that have characterised PFM schemes in other contexts, such as conflicts arising from forest governance restructuring, elite capture, and illegitimate benefit sharing, but has been less successful in addressing some aspects related to participation, such as involving village hamlets and women more effectively in decision making due to spatial configuration of landscapes and settlements and to existing cultural norms. These insights suggest that well-implemented PFM can provide a solid foundation for REDD+ implementation but that full realisation of REDD+s equitable benefit-sharing principle, particularly at the intracommunity level, may take time and will be dependent upon prevailing local cultural norms.