Esteve Corbera

In light of the Aichi target to manage protected areas equitably by 2020, we ask how the conservation sector should be incorporating concerns for social justice. We focus in particular on 'recognition', because it is the least well understood aspect of environmental justice, and yet highly relevant to conservation because of its concern with respect for local knowledge and cultures. In order to explore the meaning of recognition in the conservation context, we take four main steps. First, we identify four components of recognition to serve as our analytical framework: subjects of justice, the harms that constitute injustice, the mechanisms that produce injustices , and the responses to alleviate these. Secondly, we apply this framework to explore four traditions of thinking about recognition: Hegelian intersubjectivity, critical theory, southern decolonial theory, and the capabilities approach. Thirdly, we provide three case studies of conservation conflicts highlighting how different theoretical perspectives are illustrated in the claims and practices of real world conservation struggles. Fourthly, we finish the paper by drawing out some key differences between traditions of thinking, but also important areas of convergence. The convergences provide a basis for concluding that conservation should look beyond a distributive model of justice to incorporate concerns for social recognition, including careful attention to ways to pursue equality of status for local conservation stakeholders. This will require reflection on working practices and looking at forms of intercultural engagement that, for example, respect alternative ways of relating to nature and biodiversity.

Carbon forestry has become a cornerstone of attempted climate change mitigation in developing countries.
As such, dozens of projects have been developed to supply carbon offsets to both voluntary and regulated
carbon markets. In this paper we shed further light on the effects of such projects on communities
and households by studying the implementation of a carbon forestry project in four communities in the
state of Chiapas, Mexico. The project pays farmers to carry out a number of tree-planting activities
depending on the local agro-ecological systems. We investigate how such activities have been promoted
in and adopted by communities and we identify a series of community-based, institutional, resource
management and asset-related factors that explain farmers’ willingness to participate in the projects.
Our analysis highlights a number of shared motivations for joining the project but varied levels of understanding
about the project rationale. We also show how community norms, access to land tenure, financial
and physical assets differ among participants and non-participants which translates in increasing
inequalities in access to income and to other development projects. However, we also demonstrate that
project activities, as currently designed, motivate some farmers to participate because of the potential of
the project to act as a mechanism to bridge existing social divides through cooperation in the project and
therefore financially and politically benefit from participation. Overall, the paper demonstrates that the
project contributes to transforming local livelihoods and institutions, unfortunately not always as originally
designed.

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, eff...

The contributions collected in this special issue of ephemera question the underlying ideologies and assumptions of carbon markets, and bring to light many of the contradictions and antagonisms that are currently at the heart of ‘climate capitalism’. They offer a critical assessment of the political economy of carbon trading, and a detailed understanding of how these newly created markets are designed, how they (don’t) work, the various actors that are involved, and how these actors function together to create and contest the ‘atmosphere business’. In 5 notes, 6 articles, 1 interview and 3 book reviews, some of the most prominent critical voices in debates about the atmosphere business are brought together in this special issue.

Short title: Payment for Ecosystems Services in Catalonia Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) are an innovative environmental policy instrument that aims to reward natural resource managers in return for maintaining or improving the provision of ecosystem services. A wide variety of PES projects and programmes have been implemented in recent years, mostly in developing countries, and the possibility of extending the application of this instrument in Europe is increasingly considered. In this paper, we discuss the key definitional and operational principles of PES and present two initiatives developed in Catalonia that can be partially characterised as PES, namely private forest reserves and land stewardship agreements. They are financed by the public administration and environmental foundations, and allow the conservation of mature forests and valuable ecosystems. We also discuss the opportunities and challenges involved in developing new PES schemes focused on the prevention of forest fires through extensive cattle grazing and the development of small-scale watershed schemes involving private water bottling companies. We conclude that PES is a promising environmental policy instrument because it allows mobilising additional resources for environmental protection by involving private companies and foundations whilst raising environmental awareness.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has completed its Fifth Assessment Report (AR5). Here, we explore the social scientific networks informing Working Group III (WGIII) assessment of mitigation for the AR5. Identifying authors’ institutional pathways, we highlight the persistence and extent of North–South inequalities in the authorship of the report, revealing the dominance of US and UK institutions as training sites for WGIII authors. Examining patterns of co-authorship between WGIII authors, we identify the unevenness in co-authoring relations, with a small number of authors co-writing regularly and indicative of an epistemic community’s influence over the IPCC’s definition of mitigation. These co-authoring networks follow regional patterns, with significant EU–BRICS collaboration and authors from the US relatively insular. From a disciplinary perspective, economists, engineers, physicists and natural scientists remain central to the process, with insignificant participation of scholars from the humanities. The shared training and career paths made apparent through our analysis suggest that the idea that broader geographic participation may lead to a wider range of viewpoints and cultural understandings of climate change mitigation may not be as sound as previously thought.