A climate-smart world and the rise of Green Extractivism

Abstract

Climate change policies' implications for the capitalist system call for us to go beyond efficiency-driven extractivism and further analyse the outcomes of green policies. The implementation of Mozambique's climate change policy resulted in the emergence of green extractivism, a variation of extractivism that is based on the extraction, expropriation and transfer of emissions rights from rural poor, in favor of external accumulation. Emission rights are one's ability to rightfully use and benefit from ecological assets. Thus, under green extractivism, rural households are not only being deprived of resources determinant for their social reproduction, but also of their right to emit.