Carbon, carbon everywhere : How climate change is transforming conservation in Costa Rica

The growing urgency of the global campaign to address anthropogenic climate change is transforming environmental governance throughout the world in ways that have yet to be rigorously conceptualized. As climate change has, in the past decade, become what While and colleagues (2009, 2) call “the new ‘master discourse’ in environmental governance” globally, it has changed the way other significant environmental issues are understood and addressed. Increasingly, both funding and programming for environmental protection are focused on carbon capture and emissions reductions to mitigate climate impacts, forcing environmentalists to frame other issues in terms of their contribution to climate action. This has, ironically, created new conf licts among environmental priorities, for “discourses of climate change can be mobilized politically to justify social and technical fixes for states that environmentalists find unacceptable” (While et al. 2009, 10). At the same time, climate action is spurring novel social conf licts, in that “climate change discourse has a powerful moral imperative, especially when it intersects with questions of national security” (While et al. 2009, 10), and can therefore be used to override the interests of particular groups when issues of national (and/or global) security are deemed to be at stake