Symbols of Climate Action: Audit Labor and the Production of Carbon Credits

ABSTRACT Voluntary carbon markets (VCMs) are promoted as tools for financing climate mitigation, yet their effectiveness and credibility remain contested. This article examines how carbon credits are produced and destabilized as symbols of climate action, emphasizing the forms of ecological and audit labor that sustain their legitimacy. Based on 7 months of ethnographic fieldwork and 30 interviews in Colombia, I trace the trajectory of a carbon credit from its production through local farming and auditing practices to its circulation at a chocolate fair in Paris. Drawing on Kockelman's semiotic ontology of the commodity, I show that credits acquire value only by establishing a credible equivalence between ecological practices and their symbolic representation. However, the audit labor of measuring, verifying, and certifying often outweighs or appropriates ecological labor, producing credibility rather than mitigation. When this gap becomes visible, the market responds not by aligning more closely with ecological practices but by multiplying layers of verification—an “audit spiral” that sustains credibility while deepening opacity.