Making Mud Matter: Blue Carbon and the Financialization of South Korea’s Coastline

• In Event: Ecosystems, Ecology, and the Boundaries of Life

Abstract

My research is situated in South Korea where I investigate how the phenomenon of climate change and policy efforts intended to mitigate its effects organize social and material worlds. In this paper, I investigate South Korea’s ambitions to become a leader in what is called the global carbon market—a financial system designed to produce and trade carbon emission offsets by quantifying and valuing carbon stored within organic matter in terrestrial or marine environments. More specifically, this paper centers on efforts made by Korean ecologists and policy makers to understand and govern the distribution of carbon sequestered in South Korea’s world-renowned coastal mudflat habitats, referred to as blue carbon. In doing so, I ask how South Korea’s attempts to leverage blue carbon within global carbon markets animate an unremarkable material—mud—as well as the breadth of organic life and geological processes that constitute its capacities to sequester carbon, with qualities integral to the preservation of state sovereignty and the stabilization of a world climate more broadly. A central dimension of this research is how scientific efforts to understand blue carbon sequestration join discrete processes and actors across disparate domains into unified systems and how the financial valuation of these systems inspires new forms of ecological governance. These questions are further guided by a particular critique of blue carbon science I encountered in the field, which holds that “mud is life” and, thus, resistant toward total quantification and governance.

Author

• Gebby Keny, Rice University