The importance of communal forests in carbon storage: Using and destabilizing carbon measurement in understanding Guatemala's payments for ecosystem services

Abstract

Communal forests contain more standing carbon than private forests in the Western Highlands of Guatemala.• No statistically significant differences were found in carbon stocks between incentivized and nonincentivized plots. • Measuring carbon can be a tool to describe ecosystems but should not lead to the prioritization of carbon storage or sequestration over other values of forests.Payments for ecosystem services (PES) are a conservation initiative that offer payments to people who own or manage lands that provide desired ecosystem services. Utilizing mixed methods, I examine how PES in the form of government-issued forestry incentives interact with land tenure to affect carbon storage in Guatemala's Western Highlands. Land tenure is a larger determining factor for carbon storage than payments, as communal forests managed by Indigenous Maya K'iche' communities have significantly higher carbon stocks than private landholdings in these same communities. No statistically significant differences were found in carbon stocks between incentivized and non-incentivized plots, and participants enrolled only a fraction of their land, likely prioritizing enrollment of degraded plots. These results indicate the importance of using both social and physical science methods to understand the physical outcomes and social context of forest management. I also reflect on why carbon storage is often prioritized, drawing on a critical physical geography framework to analyze carbon accounting methods. Measuring carbon storage gives us the tools to describe the success of communal forest management, yet I also caution relying on the quantification of ecosystem services as a method for landscape valuation and suggest avoiding prioritizing carbon storage and sequestration.

Practicing critical physical geography: New trading zones and interactional expertise in an expanding field

“…CPG asks researchers to navigate the complexity of using particular tools while also critiquing, reimagining, and repurposing them. VonHedemann (2022) meets these goals while examining the impact of land tenure on the effectiveness of carbon offsets as part of payment for ecosystem services (PES) programs. VonHedemann collects biophysical data from forest sites in Guatemala to measure carbon stocks while simultaneously cautioning against an overreliance on this tool to understand complex eco‐social flows of carbon.…”

“…For example, authors propose methods and objectives explicitly intended to investigate the practices and subsequent discourses of environmental researchers, including the authors themselves (e.g., Anderson et al, 2022). Others call for and employ research and sampling designs tailored to the specific characteristics of their study sites (e.g., vonHedemann, 2022, this special section), as opposed to methodological and statistical standards that capture broader patterns in a single field and often obscure local‐scale eco‐social relations. VonHedemann goes further to reflexively critique methods they employ, noting the uncertainties surrounding their attempts to engage in more complex and socially embedded research.…”