The mobilisation of refugee labour for carbon credits as maladaptive practice

Abstract

The Refugee Environmental Protection (REP) Fund is a programme designed to turn refugees and their labour into a source of carbon credits for global carbon markets. Established by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the Fund invests in clean cookstove and reforestation projects in and around refugee camps, with the resulting (imputed) reduction in CO₂ (and CO₂ equivalent) emissions and sequestration of CO₂ converted into saleable carbon credits, which, in turn, make the camps more financially sustainable. We take issue with the REP Fund. First, we argue that there are multiple and very fundamental problems with carbon credits, offsets and carbon accounting. Second, the REP Fund is reliant upon and complicit in producing refugees as hyper-exploitable and precarious labour. Third, as an instrument of so-called social finance, the REP Fund has the potential to integrate into the web of planetary financial discipline the several million people confined to UN refugee camps. Fourth, the REP Fund, whose advocates claim as an additional benefit a reduction in gender-based violence, risks reproducing assumptions that naturalise the primary threat of such violence as coming from outside the home, rather than inside it. In conclusion, we argue that we can understand the REP Fund as part of a maladaptive labour cycle, which works both directly and indirectly to use the labour of those displaced to maintain their own displacement while worsening environmental and climate outcomes.