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Please see our CfP for the RGS-IBG 2025 conference in Birmingham, 26-29th August. Deadline for abstracts is Friday, 21st February.

Carbon Creations and Creative Carbons: The Politics of Carbon in Land Management and Restoration Conveners: Krg Kama (University of Birmingham), Anna Krzywoszynska (University of Oulu), James Palmer (University of Bristol) The link between carbon and land is fast emerging as a key focus for both private and public actors. Following the inclusion of land use emissions in GHG inventories and trading schemes, soils and associated ecosystems (e.g. wetlands, forests, croplands, grasslands) have come to be seen and valued mainly through the lens of their carbon-binding capacity. This tunnel vision on carbon has already begun to reshape national policies, scientific and industry practices, land management techniques in agriculture, and other diverse sectors and livelihoods, which are being rapidly transformed via initiatives such as "carbon farming", afforestation, or peatland restoration. Moving beyond the cultivation of traditional economic crops, it is the carbon levels of soils themselves that become a novel unit to be valued, calculated, and increasingly also traded in the form of emissions and nature credits. The incorporation and commodification of land-based carbon removals in net-zero calculations can be understood as another instance of intersection between resource-making and nonhuman labour (Kama 2020; Krzywoszynska 2020; Palmer 2021). Indeed, nature's regenerative potential is overall undergoing rapid marketization and financialization, being redefined as ecosystems services, nature-based solutions, and natural capital (Huff and Brock 2023; Ouma et al. 2018; Sullivan 2018; Usher 2023). However, this panel starts with the premise that such top-down carbon-led imperatives do not act in straightforward ways, nor fully pre-determine actors' realities of landscape and land use changes. Therefore, we invite papers that investigate, firstly, the shape of 'carbon creations': the specific carbon materialities and assemblages which are emerging. Secondly, we are interested in reflections on the creative uses, mis-uses, and resistances to carbon-centred land politics in practice. Our key guiding question is: what is carbon "good for" and for whom is carbon "good for"? On the one hand, we note that carbon-led policy and market initiatives are inherently creative, as they seek to both abstract carbon from complex socio-ecological systems and to reconfigure established land management practices (Galvin and Garzon 2023; Krzywoszynska 2024), including by capitalizing on hitherto marginalized academic-practitioner movements (e.g. agroecology, paludiculture, continuous cover forestry). The science of soil management and restoration ecology, moreover, is not uniform and readily available to inform policy and market-making, but is itself contested, experimental, and evolving, especially as traditional field-based methods are being hastily replaced by novel remote sensing technologies, digitalization, and automation of data processing (Gabrys et al. 2022; Nost and Goldstein 2022; Stanley 2024; Turnhout and Lynch 2024). On the other hand, we contend that global climate policy objectives may also be creatively adapted and strategically reinvented by diverse actors at different scales, as they incite longer-standing societal debates over specific socio-economic objectives, values, and justice. Finally, the measurement and valuation of carbon through these reworked scientific and management practices, which can underpin its commodification, is also co-produced by the complex and dynamic nature of soil biomes themselves and their interactions with associated ecosystems and the atmosphere. The aim of this call is to build a new collaborative agenda around the carbon creations and creative (re)appropriation of carbon in land management and restoration, scoping out the need for critical social science interrogation in light of a rapidly moving policy landscape and natural science research field. We invite contributions that engage with any of the following themes:

• What kinds of carbon, and what kinds of arrangements around carbon, are emerging as important, why, and to whom?
• What knowledges, infrastructures and processes are needed, and being invented, to make particular 'carbon creations' possible?
• How do such 'carbon creations' interact with pre-existing socio-political agendas and knowledge controversies, e.g. around agricultural and forestry management, biodiversity conservation, water governance, or commons management?
• How are climate and net zero policy objectives being strategically interpreted and reinvented by diverse actors working with land at different scales?
• In what ways do carbon accounting and commodification agendas appropriate and re-work extant soil science, land management and nature restoration practices for new ends?
• How are practices of carbon accounting and commodification co-produced by the lively materialities of soil biomes themselves in different socio-ecological contexts?
• What should be the role of social science and humanities scholars in contributing new ideas and ways of seeing land and landscape to these rapidly evolving agendas? Please send your title and a 150-word abstract by Friday, 21st February to the conveners: k.kama@bham.ac.uk, anna.krzywoszynska@oulu.fi, james.palmer@bristol.ac.uk. To enable the participation of scholars with diverse backgrounds and caring responsibilities, we are also considering applying for a hybrid session, so please let us know if you are interested in contributing but cannot travel to Birmingham in person. References: Gabrys, J. et al. (2022) Reworking the political in digital forests: The cosmopolitics of socio-technical worlds. Progress in Environmental Geography, 1(1-4): 58-83. Galvin, S. S. and Silva Garzn, D. (2023) The political life of mitigation: From carbon accounting to agrarian counter-accounts. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 50(6): 2259-2282. Huff, A. and Brock, A. (2023) Introduction: Accumulation by restoration and political ecologies of repair. Environment and Planning E, 6(4): 2113-2133. Kama, K. (2020) Resource-making controversies: Knowledge, anticipatory politics and economization of unconventional fossil fuels. Progress in Human Geography, 44(2): 333-356. Krzywoszynska, A. (2020) Nonhuman labour and the making of resources. Making soil a resource through microbial labour. Environmental Humanities, 12(1): 227-249. Krzywoszynska, A. (2024) "You can't manage what you can't measure": Regenerative agriculture, farming by numbers, and calculability in soil microbiopolitics. Environment and Planning E, 7(4): 1691-1710. Nost, E. and Goldstein, J. (2022) A political ecology of data. Environment and Planning E, 5(1): 3-17. Ouma, S., Johnson, L., and Bigger, P. (2018) Rethinking the financialization of 'nature'. Environment and Planning A, 50(3): 500-511. Palmer, J. (2021) Putting forests to work? Enrolling vegetal labor in the socioecological fix of bioenergy resource making. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 111(1): 141-156. Stanley, T. (2024) Carbon 'known not grown': Reforesting Scotland, advanced measurement technologies, and a new frontier of mitigation deterrence. Environmental Science & Policy, 151. Sullivan, S. (2018) Making nature investable: From legibility to leverageability in fabricating 'nature' as 'natural capital'. Science and Technology Studies, 31(3): 47-76. Turnhout, E. and Lynch, C.R. (2024) Raising the carbonized forest: Science and technologies of singularization. Environment and Planning F. Usher, M. (2023) Restoration as world-making and repair: A pragmatist agenda. Environment and Planning E, 6(2): 1252-1277.

Best wishes, Krg, Anna, and James

Dr Krg Kama (she/her) Associate Professor in Human Geography University of Birmingham School of Geography, Earth, and Environmental Sciences Current research: Peatscapes Webpage | LinkedIn | Publications EASST's Eurograd mailing list -- eurograd-easst.net@lists.easst.net Archive: https://lists.easst.net/hyperkitty/list/eurograd-easst.net@lists.easst.net/ Edit your delivery settings there using Account dropdown, Mailman settings. Website: https://easst.net/easst_eurograd/ Meet us on Mastodon: https://assemblag.es/@easst Or X: https://twitter.com/STSeasst