How can we go from carbon conflicts to climate justice?

illuminem is proud to partner with Greenhouse Gas Removal Future Leaders Network to amplify the voices of emerging climate innovators and thought leaders. This article reflects our shared commitment to empowering young leaders who are shaping solutions for a sustainable future.

An undercurrent of what is significantly stifling supply and demand for carbon dioxide removal (CDR), particularly in the USA, is pushback from environmental justice activists and communities and their justified concerns about the safety and distribution of benefits and burdens that comes from carbon removal development. Currently, there is little to no formalized resourcing available in CDR development processes to support communities in ensuring that CDR is justice-oriented: where communities are informed about the specifications of a potential carbon project development opportunity in their area and how they can best get involved, they have democratic decision-making power about the operational components of a strategy or facility and its wealth-generating benefits, and they have means to direct revenues from CDR profits to redress adjacent environmental justice issues in their communities. This has caused many corporate actors, industries, and governments to slow engagements with carbon removal procurement, as they are risk-averse in regard to the demonstrated harms that permanent CDR deployment has had in the past.

The carbon removal sector is acutely aware of issues of climate injustice. Multiple social scientists and governance scholars have found that carbon removal deployment through REDD+ and the voluntary carbon market have created significant land use conflicts -- leading to land grabbing, state formalization and legibility of land governance, and dispossession of Indigenous and vulnerable communities around the world, perpetuating what scholar Holly Jean Buck deems, carbon colonialism. It is clear that across multiple contexts, specific land histories, informed by histories of colonialism, imperialism, occupation, and dispossession, have informed who can access land-based carbon dioxide removal opportunities. The compliance and voluntary systems governing carbon removal projects have also not extended any favors to land stewards responsible for carbon management, as studies have found that they are often the least compensated and have the least amount of decision-making power in the development of carbon projects. 

In the United States of America, the development of carbon removal is embedded in a history of consolidation of land for industrialized agriculture and development, which has occurred through means of land grabbing from Indigenous communities and dispossession of land from African Americans, creating a legacy of systemic land inequity still experienced today. Indigenous and Black land stewards in particular have forcibly had their knowledge, land, and wealth stripped from them over centuries of violence, terror, and exclusion through legal and extra-legal institutions as evidenced in the U.S during the Jim Crow Era. This wealth has yet to be reconciled for.. Even when Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities remained on their lands, there were many forms of informal ownership that institutions preyed upon to steal familial lands. The amount of land loss from settler colonialism and systemic racism has been demanded back in movements for Land Back to Indigenous communities and broader aims of land justice. 

It appears as though the politics of the sustainable transition could be synergistic with these wider goals. Yet, opportunities to participate in carbon dioxide removal deployment has precluded Black, Brown, and Indigenous land steward participation. This has fashioned ‘sustainability as usual’ futures that have granted wealth-generating benefits disproportionately to white landholders. How do we account for these histories, and ensure reparative and environmental justice is centered when deploying carbon removal strategies and technologies? 

The United States Department of Agriculture released an assessment of carbon interactions with land stewards and have called for additional resourcing necessary to ensure carbon drawdown success. While more education on navigating carbon opportunities is critical, oftentimes, vulnerable land stewards will require pre-development financing that can support the resolving of litigation disputes, the acquisition and retention of land for carbon removal, and the readiness of the land and the steward to carbon drawdown opportunities. There must be up-front financing available, whether from the carbon project developer, government, or philanthropy to support the preparedness of the land steward to participate in carbon drawdown. 

Over the duration of the project, vulnerable land stewards have expressed concern on the invasiveness of ongoing monitoring, reporting, and verification requirements. Overbearing site visits from strangers and extensive soil and biogeochemical testing labor needs have kept the bar of participation significantly higher than land steward capacity. While accurate MRV is critical to maintaining the integrity of a project, technological capacity must be increased to efficiently gather carbon sequestration data without being intrusive of the land steward or their day-to-day management operations. Carbon facilitators must be cognizant and empathetic to land steward hesitation, and create monitoring options that create little capacity burdens for land stewards. For example, some carbon developers have been exploring how to best integrate remote sensing, biogeochemical modeling, land steward self-reporting, and training community members to conduct carbon MRV site visits to alleviate associated burdens and foster trust-based accountability.

As industrial solutions are developed in the U.S. there must be democratic mechanisms in place that can support local communities everywhere in retaining their sovereignty over their lands, dictating what land uses are and are not permitted in their backyards. Without this active consent, ownership, and decision-making power in the carbon development process, any carbon project will face challenges and pushback from surrounding communities looking to protect their ancestral lands. While community benefits agreements provides a powerful precedence for integrating community participation and developer accountability vis-a-vis large infrastructure development, there is an appetite to understand how they can be further developed to incorporate community involvement from the beginning of the siting process, mechanisms for decision-making power to communities, and create tangible wealth-generating benefits to communities.

Imagine, in dreaming of a new future for sustainable development, communities that can center the development of carbon drawdown strategies and infrastructure that is life-giving, abundant, and alimentary. What could it look like to activate, mobilize and compensate land stewarding communities for supporting carbon drawdown efforts, ensuring they have sovereignty and agency over their participation in carbon removal development? While Justice40 federal guidelines account for a disturbing 40% of benefits to environmental justice communities and the Roads to Removal analysis provide foundational parameters for social and ethical considerations for infrastructure placement, they do little to understand how to materially implement environmental justice over the course of a carbon project’s operational lifespan. By centering reparative and environmental justice in carbon removal strategies, we can create a future where sustainability benefits everyone equitably. Centering the agency of vulnerable communities over land-based carbon removal not only addresses historical injustices but also fosters resilient and inclusive climate solutions.

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