Draft of Chapter 1. In: Larry A. Swatuk & Lars Wirkus, Eds, Water, Climate Change and the Boomerang Effect: Unintential Consequences for Resource Insecurity (London & New York: Earthscan), forthcoming 2018
The Boomerang Effect: Overview and Implications for Climate Governance Larry A. Swatuk, Lars Wirkus, Florian Krampe, Bejoy K. Thomas, Luis Paulo Batista da Silva Introduction The world is ramping up its actions toward combating human-induced climate change. Through the COP processes, national governments have committed to a wide variety of mitigation and adaptation actions through their NDCs (Nationally Determined Contributions) to emissions reduction. While actions are to be primarily taken at national level, it is made clear that ‘parties may use internationally transferred mitigation outcomes to achieve NDCs’ (Article 6 of the Paris Agreement). This opens a path for such things as carbon-market development, biofuels production and other forms of green energy and green economy development. How these will all be measured and evaluated is rather opaque. It is clear, however, that developing countries, particularly those most vulnerable to climate change, are least able to design, implement, monitor and evaluate climate action interventions. Billions of dollars are to be made available for these actions through mechanisms such as the Green Climate Fund (GCF); and billions more are likely to be generated through largely artificially devised carbon markets. While the narrative of ‘global threat leading to collective action’ seems straight forward, the actual landscape of global climate governance is fragmented and fraught with contradictions, conflicts and conundrums (Widerberg and Pattberg, 2016). Moreover, the ‘crisis’ aspect of the narrative encourages states to scramble around for examples of ‘good practice’, relabelling and marketing existing development interventions in the name of climate change adaptation and mitigation. Forests have suddenly become not a living entity both intrinsically valuable and instrumentally valuable to animals and humans alike, but a category for meeting emissions targets. Agriculture has become both threat and opportunity in relation to both adaptation and mitigation: particular agricultural practices are regarded as greenhouse gas emission heavy; others are seen to be climate friendly. While the transformation from the former to the latter is 1