Carbon Offsetting: Sustaining Consumption?

By Heather Lovell, H. Bulkeley, D. Liverman. 2009

173 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this paper we examine how theories of sustainable and ethical consumption help us to understand a new, rapidly expanding type of consumer product designed to mitigate climate change: carbon offsets. The voluntary carbon offset market grew by 200% between 2005 and 2006, and there are now over 150 retailers of voluntary carbon offsets worldwide. Our analysis concentrates on the production and consumption of carbon offsets, drawing on ideas from governmentality and political ecology about how narratives and technologies are used to create particular types of consumer subjectivities and shape consumer choice. We critically examine three narratives that offset producers are using to position carbon offsets and examine how these narratives are shaping circuits of carbon offset production and consumption. We assess the implications for the future governance of voluntary carbon offset markets and for the study of alternative consumption.

Subfields: Geography, Planning and Development, Marketing, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0ff89b1e553aea645177a49a6524a651c6cc44df

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Citations in the corpus

Offsetting Benefits? Analyzing Access to Forest Carbon (2010, background): “…carbon forestry, buyers can be persuaded by elaborated narratives of a project's contribution to biodiversity conservation and poverty alleviation (Lovell et al, 2009), and in reality purchase offsets grounded on conflicting labour arrangements and negative impacts on local ecosystems, as is…”
Business strategies and management accounting in response to climate change risk exposure and regulatory uncertainty (2017, background): “Companies are also likely to buy voluntary carbon offsets for their products/services that extend beyond production processes (Lovell et al., 2009; Scipioni et al., 2012).”
Understanding Carbon Offset Technologies (2010, background): “As we argue elsewhere (Lovell et al. 2009), the discourse about carbon offset projects is particularly important in the voluntary offset market: certain carbon credits are attractive because they have a story associated with them and can be sold at a premium as ‘gourmet’ or ‘boutique’ carbon with…”
Climate policy through changing consumption choices: Options and obstacles for reducing greenhouse gas emissions (2014, unknown): “Still, it can be an effective strategy to ﬁnance low GHG production through the consumer and is also increasingly used, not only for compensating air travel emissions, but also as a voluntary measure from retailers (Lovell et al., 2009).”
Climate change accounting research: keeping it interesting and different (2011, background): “, Lohmann, 2005, 2006, 2009a, 2009b; Smith, 2007; Newell, 2008; Knox-Heyes, 2009a, 2009b), carbon offsetting (Bäckstrand and Lövbrand, 2006; Bumpus and Liverman, 2008; Smith and Rodger, 2009), and emerging codes of conduct and voluntary standards (Lovell et al., 2009).”
Green identity, green living? The role of pro-environmental self-identity in determining consistency across diverse pro-environmental behaviours (2010, methodology): “Based on previous qualitative research (Lippincott Mercer, 2006; Lovell et al., 2009), 15 statements were developed to measure attitudes to offsetting on a 5-point scale from ‘strongly agree’ to ‘strongly disagree’.”