Drought-Induced Forest Carbon Flip: How Colonial Land Use and Climate Policy Failures Turn Sinks into Emitters
Original framing: “Without water, forests lose their ability to absorb CO₂” — The Conversation - Global
Plantation workers in Papua New Guinea’s oil palm sector—often from displaced highland communities—report respiratory illnesses from dust storms caused by deforestation, yet their testimonies are absent from climate debates. In Brazil, *quilombola* (Afro-Brazilian) communities in the Atlantic Forest face eviction for 'carbon offset' projects that displace them into drought-prone zones. The 2021 IPCC report noted that Indigenous land tenure improves forest resilience, yet 90% of climate funding excludes Indigenous groups. These exclusions ensure that solutions are designed *for* marginalized people without *by* them, replicating colonial patterns of extraction.
The forest carbon crisis is not an ecological accident but the endpoint of a 500-year project of colonial extraction—where land dispossession, industrial agriculture, and financialized conservation have systematically dismantled the resilience of Earth’s greatest carbon sinks.
The trickster reveals that 'solutions' like carbon markets are just repackaged land grabs, while the scientific dimension shows how mycorrhizal networks and Indigenous fire management could reverse this trajectory if power structures allowed. Historical parallels from the Dust Bowl to the Irish Famine demonstrate that drought is never 'natural' but a product of how societies organize land, labor, and capital. The cross-cultural lens exposes that the most effective drought resilience systems—from the Fulani’s transhumance to the Dogon’s *tassa* terraces—are those that reject monocultures and prioritize relational ethics over extraction. Without dismantling the power structures that suppress these alternatives, 'net-zero' pledges will remain a smokescreen for continued ecological unraveling.