Amber Huff is an anthropologist and political ecologist based at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex in the UK, where she is part of the Resource Politics and Environmental Change research group and coordinator of the Centre for Future Natures. She is interested in conservation, the carbon spectacle, commons, autonomous education, the ‘doing’ of science, speculative and spectral fiction, storytelling, and making art, comic books and zines. Her research bridges science, technology and the politics of environmental change, exploring relationships between evolving logics and contested ecologies of crisis, enclosure and ‘repair’; the roles of narrative, knowledge and technology in mediating society-nature relationships at multiple scales, and people’s struggles for free life and just futures. She has led research in Madagascar, Kenya, South Africa, the Southern United States and the United Kingdom and is a member of the Advisory Collective for the Political Ecology Network (POLLEN). She is currently co-leading the REPAiR project, which uses interdisciplinary research, transdisciplinary collaboration and ‘research storytelling’ to understand whether and how context-sensitive and community-engaged approaches to landscape restoration framed in terms of ‘Nature-based Solutions’ can support adaptability and resilience in Southern African rangelands.
Title Title (preliminary): Fictions, Frictions, Fractures: Remaking Nature in Repair Mode
Dr. Taryn Fuentes Castillo is a conservation scientist with over 19 years of experience at the interface of climate change, biodiversity, and ecosystem monitoring. She holds a PhD from the Universidad de Chile (2017) and currently serves as Senior Scientist at Carbon Real, where she leads applied research on forest carbon accounting in Chilean Patagonia. Her research integrates eddy covariance measurements, LiDAR, and satellite remote sensing to support near real-time carbon accounting in native forests of the Global South. In her presentation, she will share her trajectory at the intersection of ecological measurement and climate finance, and outline both the possibilities and challenges of translating complex forest ecosystems into carbon metrics.
Title Title: From Measurement to Market:
What Carbon Accounting Can—and Cannot—Deliver for Native Forests in the Global South
In her presentation, Dr. Taryn Fuentes-Castillo shares her work at the intersection of ecological measurement and climate finance, asking whether carbon markets truly can protect native forests, and what happens when ecological complexity does not align with the logic of certification? Drawing on empirical data from CO₂ flux monitoring in old-growth temperate forests in Chilean Patagonia, she explores what carbon markets can—and cannot—deliver for native forest conservation in the Global South. The talk invites an honest discussion on the limitations of carbon and biodiversity certification, and what would be required for these mechanisms to fulfil their promises.