SUSTCARB: Towards Sustainable Carbon Markets in Tanzania

SUSTCARB examines how new standards and technologies are changing carbon markets in Tanzania and beyond.

It focuses on three aspects:

1. The costs and benefits associated with carbon markets across rural people in project sites to market actors at the international level.

2. The role of carbon markets in legitimizing different livelihoods and lifestyles across Global South and North contexts.

3. How new market standards and technologies create a need for new skillsets and capacities and how this, in turn, shapes how different people and institutions can participate in carbon markets.

The project is implemented in a collaboration between the University of Dodoma, Sokoine University of Agriculture and University of Copenhagen and involves the training of two PhD students and two postdocs.

We map the larger universe of carbon projects in Tanzania to gain an overview and identify projects for further study.

We reach out to all identified projects to gather basic information about them, including about challenges and reasons for delays or abandonment.

We do on-the-ground, in-depth research on 2-3 selected projects with a focus on what happens from local to national levels, i.e. how carbon projects interact with existing land governance processes to produce carbon commodities and the resulting impacts on livelihoods and institutional hierarchies.

We focus on the national to international level to trace the connections from project sites to the international carbon markets.

We examine how carbon is commodified, how the commodification positions different livelihoods and lifestyles as more or less sustainable, and shapes institutional configurations and hierarchies.

We train two PhDs and two postdocs.

We review and develop existing teaching curricula of relevance to carbon markets across all partner universities and organize workshops on equity in research collaborations, digital ethnography, scientific writing and grant writing.

With a basis in our research, a desk study of sustainability innovations within carbon markets, and our annual stakeholder forums with Tanzanian and international carbon market actors, we develop five policy briefs on sustainable and just carbon markets.

We develop targeted means of communicating the research findings to the study communities, the Tanzanian public, the academic community, and Tanzanian and international carbon market actors.

• Yonika Ngaga, Sokoine University of Agriculture

• Rose Kicheleri, Sokoine University of Agriculture

• Mathew Bukhi Mabele, University of Dodoma

• Wilhelm Kiwango, University of Dodoma