Background

Wim Carton is a Human Geographer by training, with a background in Development Studies, International Relations and History. He has a PhD in Human geography from Lunds University, department of Human Geography.

Research focus area

Wim's main academic objective is to help understand society-nature relations, and how these are changed and articulated through various sustainability challenges. Broadly speaking, his research is focused on the political economy of climate change mitigation and adaptation in agriculture and forestry. His PhD thesis, which was defended in September 2016, examined various market-based mechanisms for climate and energy policy and sought to understand the environmental outcomes they generate. The two research projects that he is currently involved in to some extent build on this. The first project studies two carbon forestry projects in the global South, where he focus on the notion of 'forest carbon', the way it is conceptualized and practiced at different moments along the carbon offsetting value chain, and the conflicts and sustainability problems this gives rise to. Secondly, he is coordinating a larger research project on Sustainability and Resilience in which, together with smallholder farmers in Uganda, they are experimenting with various perennial farming systems as a way to increase carbon sequestration in soils and simultaneously counteract land degradation and therewith decrease the vulnerability of smallholder farmers.

Theoretically and methodologically, his research is interdisciplinary in its ambition and situated within the broad field of political ecology. In the past he has drawn particular inspiration from debates in geography on the commodification and neoliberalization of nature. Wim's other research interests include energy studies, environmental and climate justice, environmental history, critical political economy, and the political ecology of sustainable agriculture and plant breeding.

Relevant publications

Carton, W. and Andersson, E. (2017). Where Forest Carbon Meets Its Maker: Forestry- Based Offsetting as the Subsumption of Nature. Society & Natural Resources, 30 (7), 829-843.

Carton, W. (2017). Dancing to the Rhythms of the Fossil Fuel Landscape: Landscape inertia and the temporal limits to market-based climate policy. Antipode, 49(1), 43-61.

Giardullo, P., Sergi, V., Carton, W. et al. (2016). Air quality from a social perspective in four European metropolitan areas: Evidence and research hypotheses from the SEFIRA project. Environmental Science and Policy, 65, 58-64.

Carton, W. (2016). Money for nothin’ and coal for free: ‘Technology neutrality’ and biomass development under the Flemish Tradable Green Certificate scheme. Geoforum, 70, 69-78.

Carton, W. (2014). Environmental protection as market pathology?: carbon trading and the dialectics of the “double movement.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 32(6), 1002–1018.

Carton, W., Jönsson, E., & Bustos, B. (2017). Revisiting the “Subsumption of Nature”: Resource Use in Times of Environmental Change. Society & Natural Resources, 30 (7), 789-796.

Andersson, E. and Carton, W. (2017). Sälja luft? Om klimatkompensation och miljörättvisa i Uganda. In: Politisk ekologi: om makt och miljöer. Jönsson, E. & Andersson, E. (eds.) Studentlitteratur, Lund.

Carton, W. (2016). Fictitious Carbon, Fictitious Change? Environmental Implications of the Commodification of Carbon. Lund University Dissertation. Media Tryck, Lund.