Jonas Hein

This special issue (SI) shows that environmental justice perspectives are especially useful for analysing current socio-ecological conflicts. These perspectives help to bridge epistemological and ontological gaps in inter- and transdisciplinary settings and promote normative and justice-oriented discussions on environmental struggles within and beyond the academy. Currently, the following two interrelated environmental crises and their impacts regularly make headlines: climate change and the impacts of the unsustainable use of the oceans. Still, for a large part of the global population – not only but especially in the Global North – both crises remain abstract, mainly becoming visible through news coverage of plastic waste in the oceans, storm surges and droughts, and through documentaries on sea-level rise and the destruction of ecosystems. However, the destruction of marine and coastal habitats and the effects of climate change are increasingly affecting people's daily lives. The effects of climate change, pollution, and marine resource overuse are creating serious disruption to livelihoods and leading to new socio-ecological conflicts and new claims. This SI aims to reflect and explore climate and marine narratives, environmental knowledge claims, multiple ontologies, climate change adaptation, and the spatial and temporal shaping of socio-ecological struggles for climate and marine justice in more detail. Furthermore, it takes up current strands of climate and marine justice scholarship and explores avenues for further research.

Indonesia's peatlands can be considered as conflict arenas where different state projects and actors compete. The case presented here stands for a new conservation controversy. The Berbak Carbon Initiatives overlap with a settlement project, inducing struggles among different state apparatuses, transnational actors, and peasants. This article is based on a novel conceptual approach building on political ecology, politics of scale and state theory for investigating divergent and transnationalised state projects. Empirically we draw on qualitative research conducted in the province of Jambi, Sumatra. We argue that the territorial conflicts mirror the contradictory interests of different state apparatuses influenced by conservation‐oriented and development‐oriented actors in society but also by supra‐national planning institutions. In our case, the contestation becomes visible through inconsistent notions of development and property. We show how political change challenges the implementation of a forest carbon project, illustrating the high risks of mitigating climate change through offsetting.