The article describes carbon offsetting through the lens of the Makira REDD project in north-eastern Madagascar. The author describes how communities “were being asked to participate in a system that operated on timescales, markets, and legal abstractions far beyond their experience. The forest they knew was being redefined as a global asset” and “offsetting did not arrive as a choice. It came as a future already shaped elsewhere”. Citing offset projects in Tanzania, he explains how carbon offsetting “also allows fortress conservation to be reborn” and concludes that offsetting has revealed itself as a “system that asked forests to stand in for political courage”. A system that converted living landscapes into compensatory space for emissions generated elsewhere. A system that shifted the constraint onto people with the least power to refuse it”. The article is available in English here.
The article describes carbon offsetting through the lens of the Makira REDD project in north-eastern Madagascar. The author describes how communities “were being asked to participate in a system that operated on timescales, markets, and legal abstractions far beyond their experience.