Carbon Conflicts and Forest Landscapes in Africa
Pathways to Sustainability Series

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.

1. Political Ecologies of Carbon in Africa 2. Forest Carbon Projects and Policies in Africa3. Climate Emergency, Carbon Capture and Coercive Conservation on Mt. Kilimanjaro4.Carbon in Africa’s Agricultural Landscapes A Kenyan Case5. ‘Zones of Awkward Engagement’ in Ugandan Carbon Forestry 6. Implementing REDD+: Evidence from Kenya7. Carbon Projects and Communities: Dynamic Encounters in Zambia 8. Struggles over Carbon in the Zambezi Valley: The Case of Kariba REDD in Hurungwe, Zimbabwe 9. Farming Carbon in Ghana’s Transition Zone: Rhetoric versus Reality 10. Old Reserve, New Carbon Interests: The Case of the Western Area Peninsula Forest, Sierra Leone

Melissa Leach is Director of the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, UK.

Ian Scoones is a Professorial Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex and co-directs the ESRC STEPS (Social, Technological and Environmental Pathways to Sustainability) Centre, UK.