Landscapes of the Anthropocene in the UN Climate Negotiations

Landscapes of the Anthropocene in the UN Climate Negotiations By David Rojas and Noor Johnson Appeared in Anthropology News, www.anthropology-news.org Although few scholars apply the concept of the Anthropocene, its central tenets have entered mainstream discussions at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). In particular, the emergence of a “landscape approach” in climate politics assumes that human processes and planetary dynamics cannot be disentangled. Rather than focusing exclusively on parks or natural sanctuaries, participants discussing landscapes at the UNFCCC tackle ecological problems by focusing on how forestry and agriculture combine social and natural dynamics. Landscape discussions will continue to translate Anthropocene ideas in policy debates at the first Global Landscapes Forum set for November 16–17, 2013 in Warsaw, Poland. What prompted this turn to landscape, and what does it mean in the context of climate policy discussions? The landscape idiom has been adopted by diverse actors at the UNFCCC, ranging from corporations to non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to Indigenous peoples’ organizations. The strategies these groups advocate to address problems involving social and natural issues often diverge. The Global Landscapes Forum, for example, is being organized by a coalition of powerful international organizations including major NGOs, the World Bank, UNEP, IUCN, and the UNDP. Their political objective is to inform emerging UN climate agreements and to contribute to the UN’s new sustainable development goals. In pursuing a landscape approach, these actors hope to identify strategies for transforming forestry and agricultural practices by aligning them with development and environmental goals. While the main actors involved in organizing the Global Landscapes Forum view forests, agriculture, and development through an economistic lens, other coalitions mobilize landscape imaginaries in alternative ways. For example, Many Strong Voices (MSV) is a coalition of Arctic peoples and small island nations all of whom face vulnerability to melting snow and ice and rising sea levels. MSV works within a human rights framework to articulate a vision for helping the most vulnerable. Another example is COICA, a coalition of Indigenous peoples from the Amazon basin whose collective actions are based on shared opposition to regional macrodevelopment and extractive projects. Both coalitions underline how global socio-natural crises involve land rights, economic and ecological justice, and situated vulnerabilities and struggles. As anthropologists who have observed several UNFCCC meetings since 2009, we argue that the landscape approach plays into the Anthropocene’s ecological imagination—heralding a new epoch defined by humanity’s dominant role in shaping global ecological systems. The concept was first proposed by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer (2000) and is indirectly linked with the history of environmental science in the tropics. In the 1970s, Crutzen conducted research in the Amazon forest, studying flows of matter, chemical elements, and energy (Crutzen 1985). From 1 this perspective, deforestation appeared as a human-driven transmutation of organic matter into smoke particles and chemical compounds that disrupted macro-ecological dynamics and altered the chemical composition of the atmosphere—thus increasing atmospheric temperatures and limiting rainfall at regional scales. Crutzen’s methods and ideas were adopted by other scientists working in the region (Lahsen 2009). Today, Amazonia is widely understood within the scientific community not as a pristine wilderness but as a biome in transition towards a “disturbance-dominated regime” in which logging, agriculture, and large-scale engineering projects transform sedimentation, the cycling of chemicals and water, and biodiversity (Davidson et al. 2012). This is the core view of the biophysical world that characterizes the Anthropocene perspective. It is also the view that the Global Landscapes Forum will promote in Warsaw next month, where the Forum’s organizers will advocate for an integrated approach to addressing conservation, agriculture, and forestry. The landscape approach is not the first climate policy framework to address the terraforming impacts of agriculture and forestry on the rural world. A previous policy strategy, forest carbon markets, was similarly focused on socio-natural dynamics. Forest carbon market proponents reframed deforestation as a source of carbon emissions comparable to economic activities in the industrialized world. Relying on carbon accounting methods, policy-oriented scientists championing this approach suggested that parties in industrialized countries could offset their ecological impacts by paying forest landholders to leave their forests standing. Despite its heavy influence at the UNFCCC, social movements led by environmentalists and Indigenous actors resisted this strategy, arguing that it would benefit only those with sufficient resources to participate in highly technical discussions, and doubting whether it would actually enhance environmental goals, let alone safeguard human and Indigenous rights. As a response to critics of carbon accounting methods, the landscape approach relies on less abstract principles, mobilizes less technical terms, and advocates for more case-specific environmental efforts. For example, landscape proponents imagine that corporate social responsibility schemes could channel funds from mining, forestry, and macro-infrastructure projects to local conservation initiatives. Similarly, “green production” certificates could be offered to soy, palm, and sugarcane plantations that contribute to environmental activities. Unlike carbon markets, these programs could use a variety of administrative frameworks other than global accounting procedures. Moreover, the landscape approach frames socio-natural processes using more qualitative idioms and concepts such as livelihoods and land rights. This shift in discourse is meaningful, if only because it shows how alternative policy coalitions such as COICA have forced changes in language by opposing the technical approach that characterized previous socio-natural frameworks for global climate policy. In spite of these seemingly positive shifts, the logic of the mainstream landscape approach is similar to that of carbon accounting, further empowering dominant institutions and actors to 2 forge solutions to socio-natural crisis. Although in theory the Global Landscape Forum will enable landscape dwellers—farmers, Indigenous peoples, and other non-corporate actors—to share their concerns and perspectives, the agenda has been set by a small coalition of elite institutions. Consequently, the landscape framework remains faithful to the principle that environmental politics should offer large-scale economic enterprises new opportunities to expand their operations. The risk of such an economistic approach is that it may occlude the very insights that the landscape approach has the potential to foreground in climate policy debates— namely, the relevance of rights, justice, and the political histories of global capitalism to the most important problems of the Anthropocene. References: Crutzen, Paul and Eugene Stoermer. 2000. The Anthropocene. Global Change Newsletter 41: 1718. Crutzen, Paul, et al. 1985. Tropospheric Chemical Composition Measurements in Brazil During the Dry Season. Journal of Atmospheric Chemistry 2(3):233-256. Davidson, Eric, Alessandro C. de Araújo, Paulo Artaxo, Jennifer K. Balch, I. Foster Brown, Mercedes M. C. Bustamante, Michael T. Coe, et al. 2012. The Amazon Basin in Transition. Nature 481(7381):321-328. Lahsen, Myanna. 2009. A Science–Policy Interface in the Global South: The Politics of Carbon Sinks and Science in Brazil. Climatic Change 97(339-372). 3