Abstract

Carbon has increasingly been incorporated into economic and financial architectures as a tradable commodity within contemporary climate governance. Yet, carbon is not produced, stored, or mobilized in abstract space; it emerges from territorially specific land-use systems, ecological processes, and socio-spatial trajectories. This study examines carbon as a territorial commodity by analyzing long-term land-use and land-cover (LULC) dynamics in the municipality of Alegrete, located in the Brazilian Pampa biome, between 1985 and 2024. Based on MapBiomas Collection 10, and using cloud-based processing in Google Earth Engine combined with reproducible statistical workflows in R, the analysis identifies structural land-use trajectories shaping carbon-relevant territorial conditions. Results reveal a strong contraction of native grasslands, corresponding to approximately 17.8% of the municipal territory and a 24.2% reduction relative to the 1985 grassland area, alongside the expansion of mechanized agriculture, particularly soybean cultivation (+10.8% of the territory; +1343% relative to 1985 soybean area), and the consolidation of flooded rice systems (+7.6% of the territory; +146% relative to 1985 rice area). Rather than estimating carbon stocks or fluxes, the study establishes a territorial baseline linking land-use trajectories to key carbon-relevant processes, including soil carbon stability, disturbance intensity, permanence constraints, and multi-gas trade-offs. From a historical–structural perspective, these trajectories contrast with prevailing policy narratives and market-based instruments that assume an expanding carbon sequestration capacity, revealing a governance gap between valuation mechanisms and land-use realities. By conceptualizing carbon as a territorially embedded economic asset linked to land-use trajectories, the article contributes to interdisciplinary debates on climate governance, MRV integrity, environmental valuation, and the structural limits of market-based environmental instruments.

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