Forests as recarbonization? Problematizing pathways toward net-zero carbon as an ethical fix

Keywords: decarbonisation; forest; values; fix; temporality
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 08:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 09:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 47

Abstract

The transition toward renewable energy sources tends to emphasize the policy pathways which enable green technologies to flourish. Yet net-zero decarbonization pathways illustrate how our value systems are hard-wired to favour incumbent industrial practices that may only discursively ‘fix’ socioecological problems. This is why it is important to examine the spatialities and temporalities of new energy landscapes, and the value systems that underpin them. As such, this paper examines the decarbonization pathways embedded in the Swedish forestry model, specifically by drawing on a decade of media debates on the forest as carbon sink and provider of low-carbon products. We find that the net-zero imagination has heightened the division in an already polarised forest debate, and space and time are used in creative ways to portray the ‘same’ forest as either decarbonising or recarbonising. These contrasting forests are largely possible because of the divergent views on the time perspective in the coal cycle, the starting date of carbon accounting, the urgency of the climate, the rhythm of carbon emission and sequestration, and other timely choices which are closely tied to the forest knowledge and values that underpin the multiple forests articulated. As such, our case emphasises the difficulties of keeping carbon accounts separate from ethical judgement. We conclude therefore by suggesting that forest-based, net-zero pathways can be seen as an ethical fix, which hardly creates legitimacy for intense forestry in the name of the climate.