The Politics of Counting Carbon
Name of applicant
Caroline Bertram
Title
Postdoctoral Fellow
Institution
University of Copenhagen
Amount
DKK 1,747,621
Year
2025
Type of grant
Reintegration Fellowships
What?
This project investigates why territorial, production-based carbon accounting persists in global climate governance despite decades of critique and proposals to complement it with consumption-based metrics. It traces the institutional evolution of this practice, analyses the political-economic dynamics that sustain it and identifies conditions for reform.
Why?
Carbon accounting rules determine who bears the burden of climate action. The current system enables carbon leakage and generates inefficient national mitigation strategies. Reforming these practices is key to effective and equitable governance. As impacts intensify, rethinking how emissions are counted will shape the possibility of a just, low-carbon transition.
How?
Using a global ecological political economy framework, the project combines an institutional genealogy of carbon accounting, a distributional analysis of countries’ socio-economic interests and vulnerabilities and an inquiry into policy design, coalition-building and reform pathways. It employs mixed methods, drawing on diverse documents, datasets and extensive elite interviews.