Green Extractivism and Expropriation of Emission Rights amidst Mitigation Policies & the Carbon Rush

The Geography and the Environment Colloquium Series

with Natacha Bruna, Postdoctoral Associate at the Department of Global Development, Cornell University

African natural resources and biodiversity are being promoted as mitigation tools and central for market-based solutions to the current environmental crisis. The implementation of climate mitigation policies in Mozambique resulted in the emergence of green extractivism which entails the expropriation of emissions rights from rural poor in favour of historical polluters in form of carbon credits.

Adverse impacts to rural livelihoods and subsistence resulting from climate solutions inspires us to rethink climate justice as emission reduction strategies seem to be unfairly prioritizing changing social relations and access to resources from rural poor and economically disadvantaged, rather than to address industrial change from powerful actors that have contributed to the crisis historically. 

Natacha Bruna, from Mozambique, is a postdoctoral associate at the Department of Global Development at Cornell University. She holds a Ph.D. in development studies within the political ecology research group at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS, The Hague) in the Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands. She worked as a researcher and is still a member of a Mozambican independent research institution, Observatório do Meio Rural. She is also an associate editor of the Feminist Africa journal.

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