Rights-based conservation: an alternative pathway for institutional climate action

The voluntary carbon market has been criticised for failing to deliver climate goals as well as perpetuating social harms. This research proposes the concept of "rights-based climate action" as a new approach, one that may be able to deliver
better climate and environmental impacts while also supporting social outcomes. Rights-based conservation is a term that has emerged in recent years to cover a breadth of interventions that seek to achieve positive environmental
outcomes through strengthening the land tenure of Indigenous Peoples and Forest Communities (IPFCs). This has not been integrated into the research and practice on voluntary carbon markets. This project will make an original
contribution by investigating the potential role of non-state actors, including higher education institutions, in supporting rights-based projects as an alternative form of climate action to traditional offsets. The aim of this project is to produce
generative research that can contribute the urgent question of how to protect and restore land, seas, and ecosystems in ways that (a) meaningfully contribute to climate mitigation and adaptation and (b) attend to our common but differentiated response-abilities (Haraway 2016) to each other and the land.