Climate finance, emissions trading, and forestry practices in China

As part of the MPI research group on Financialization I investigate the rise of ‘climate finance’ as the economic driver of environmental projects, with a focus on Chinese land usage and forestry management. This form of climate finance rests on the creation of carbon units, conceived of as debts and credits, which are traded in ‘carbon markets’ or ‘emissions exchanges’. By establishing domestic emissions exchanges the Chinese state seeks to balance and reduce pollution from industrial heartlands through forestry projects situated in peripheral green lungs. Climate finance has come to dominate global environmental governance at the same time as Chinese citizens increasingly assert ecological demands. These include appeals made by both rural and urban residents struggling with pollution from industrial regions and cosmopolitan centres. While financial elites stand to profit from carbon markets through the use of financial instruments, farmers enter emissions exchanges by cultivating forests that offset pollution. Key questions addressed in this research are: How does climate finance reorient rural-urban relations in China? How do Chinese emissions exchanges tie rural livelihoods to the fate of financial markets? This project will therefore scrutinize climate finance’s capacity to reconfigure spatial inequalities and class interests at global, national, and local scales. It builds on my research into changing livelihood strategies in rural China, where I have focused on the shifting value of labour under conditions of economic transformation, political rupture and ecological degradation.

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