Link to Session Platform

Chairs(s):

Douglas Robb, University of British Columbia

; Karen Bakker, University of British Columbia

Description:

In this session, we convene dialogues among human, physical, and energy geographers to consider how strategies of net-zero decarbonization are transforming communities, landscapes, and socioecological relationships. Renewable energy technologies and spatial practices of carbon capture, storage, and sequestration are rapidly changing how humans and nonhumans engage with our evolving energy system. Yet discourses of “carbon neutrality” and “the circular carbon economy” complicate agendas of putative decarbonization insofar as they legitimize continued oil and gas production alongside parallel investments in carbon-reduction countermeasures; a process we term recarbonization.

Within these debates, landscapes play an increasingly central role in mediating processes of global energy transition. This mediation occurs through emerging land-based practices that reconfigure notions of care and reciprocity in coupled human-environmental systems (e.g. carbon farming). However, landscapes can also be harnessed and instrumentalized to satisfy various decarbonization agendas (e.g. bioenergy plantations, carbon sinks, and other nature-based solutions). As a result, much like climate change itself, settler colonial, anthropocentric, and speciesist approaches to decarbonization can also produce and reinforce multiple forms of injustice, especially when broader landscape impacts of energy transitions are considered.

Research on these themes is rapidly emerging as societies race to confront the catastrophic effects of climate change. However, the frantic pace of investment and technological development, driven predominantly by incumbent fossil fuel interests, often has unintended or perverse effects. These challenges are exacerbated by discourses and design projects that overlook or downplay—and hence depoliticize—the cumulative environmental impacts of the low-carbon transition. Landscapes are a powerful lens through which to interrogate these ambivalent processes.

Non-Presenting Participants Agenda