Areas of Expertise

Climate, Technology & Society

In Summer 2023, with funding from the Climate Social Science Network, I launched a research initiative to explore intersections of climate, technology, and society, specifically how non-state actors are (re)making climate governance, with particular focus on carbon offset and carbon removal technology companies. These new organizations challenge dominant paradigms of how policy is designed and enacted, and are reshaping state and institutional roles in climate policy and management. As these non-state actors grow in influence, they remain understudied in scholarly literature, and under acknowledged in policy development. This research initiative focuses on the evolving role of these actors, how they contribute to social, political, and financial transformations around decarbonization, and how they might work toward, or against, more just futures.

social studies of soil

I lead a team of social science researchers from multiple disciplines and institutions researching human dimensions of soil carbon interventions, soil carbon as carbon dioxide removal, and tensions between science and carbon market demands.

ClimatE Justice

I am co-editor (with Chris Knudson at University of Hawai’i at Hilo) of a special issue of the journal Climatic Change titled “Climate finance justice: International perspectives on climate policy, social justice, and capital.” The issue explores emerging financial mechanisms used to address climate change. We use the special issue to highlight recurring themes in critical research that demonstrate tensions between concepts of justice and economic models and financial tools. I am also working on a research article titled, “Navigating the new carbon economy: What the commodification of carbon means for climate justice discourses,” which argues that understandings of climate change are increasingly distilled to engagement with a single variable-- anthropogenic carbon emissions—which challenges common ways of conceptualizing marginalization, risk, vulnerability, and responsibility.

carbon Offsets

My dissertation research was driven by the question: What is a forest carbon offset? What are the specific political, technical, institutional, environmental, and policy-based factors that contribute to the creation of a tradable carbon offset credit? To answer this, I researched a forest carbon offset project in Maine tied to California’s cap and trade program, and another in Peru tied to a voluntary carbon market. I supplemented these case studies with participant observation in professional carbon accounting training courses. Ultimately, my dissertation demonstrated how a mechanism originally designed to address industrial greenhouse gas emissions has become a major tool for forest conservation and economic development— essentially how climate policy in one place has driven large scale investment in another. I found that, in achieving mutually exclusive goals, these mechanisms often overlook the atmospheric carbon concentrations they were designed to address.

This research contributed to the articles: “Make greenhouse-gas accounting reliable — build interoperable systems” in Nature, 2022. “You can’t value what you can’t measure: A critical look at forest carbon accounting,” in Climatic Change, 2020, and "The AAG’s emissions problem: Achieving carbon neutrality in a post-offset world.” Professional Geographer, 2021 (PDF here). My response to PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review’s symposium on Climate Transformations, found here.

Earth System Governance

From 2021-2024 I was a postdoctoral research scientist with the Earth Commission’s Transformations Working Group, a global team of researchers working to scientifically define and quantify a safe and just corridor for people and planet. We aim to define planetary justice and how justice can be integrated into the Earth Commission’s target-setting for a safe and just future.

Our Earth Commission team has an ambitious publishing agenda, including: “Earth system justice needed to identify and live within Earth system boundaries,” in Nature Sustainability; “Impacts of Meeting Minimum Access on Critical Earth Systems amidst the Great Inequality.” also in Nature Sustainability; “Achieving a nature- and people-positive future” on One Earth; and “Reconciling safe planetary targets and planetary justice: Why should social scientists engage with planetary targets?” in Earth System Governance.