Sink politics: knowing & mobilizing nature’s capacity to take-up carbon dioxide\greenhouse-gas in international climate policy

For the last 35 years the climate research and policy communities have known that not all the carbon dioxide (and other greenhouse gases) emitted stays in the atmosphere. A significant percentage of any extra gases released is taken up by natural processes; the gases are, for example, dissolved in the oceans or taken up by trees and soils, or by animals with shells. There has been, in effect, a ‘discount’ on most of our emissions. The collective term for these natural absorptive effects is that they are carbon or greenhouse-gas ‘sinks’.

In this talk I’ll be highlighting the changing ways scientists, campaigners, the climate-policy communities, and national policymakers have thought about and – increasingly – acted on these sinks in the last three decades. I’ll aim to demonstrate that Science and Technology Studies (STS) provides an excellent framework for analyzing this case – and that the case is instructive for STS too. For instance, there was early on an intense methodological and ethical argument about the ways the benefits of these sinks should be conceptualized and distributed. But these initial sink politics soon became more complicated. In part this was because ‘rights’ to sinks began from the 1990s to be included in negotiations over emissions targets, and policymakers began to ‘game’ sinks. But there was also a lot of incentive to conduct research on the functioning of the sinks themselves. It turned out, for example, that ocean sinks are (perhaps unsurprisingly) not globally uniform and that their performance differs from year to year. The capacity for sinks to absorb greenhouse gases has also been found to vary with climate change itself. Most recently, with the new treaty design (or ‘architecture’ as it’s often known) of the Paris Agreement, countries have been incentivized to come up with innovative approaches to sinks, re-thinking the value of their territories as they refresh the understanding of their national sinks. This trend will be illustrated with examples from work in the Atlantic seaboard of Europe.

Sink politics give us a powerful – and perhaps hopeful – insight into the co-making of knowledge, policy and territory.

Steven Yearley is the Professor of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge at the University of Edinburgh and is known internationally for his work on the sociology of science and on environmental sociology. His analyses have bridged these two fields. For example, he has explicated the challenges faced by environmental campaign groups when mobilizing scientific evidence as well as analyzing the difficulties in applying scientific knowledge in official environmental policy contexts. Steve has carried out extensive interdisciplinary work – conducting research with deer ecologists, climate modelers, circular-economy practitioners and citizen scientists. His most recently completed research project was part of a large-scale, multi-discipline network examining options for industrial decarbonization in the UK after Brexit and the pandemic.

During his twenty years in Edinburgh, Steve has also directed the ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum (2006-2013) and served as Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH: 2017-2022). In recognition of his cross-disciplinary work, Prof Yearley was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2010. His current research is on carbon ‘sinks’, particularly coastal and marine sinks around the UK and coastal zones of western Europe, a new frontier for climate policy.