Sarah Milne talks about how infrastructure built for sustainable needs are harming the environment. Not all intention of selling carbon credits lead to conserving and protecting the environment. In Cambodia, protecting the forests and selling carbon credits has led to illegal logging, a rise of authoritarian power in government and corruption. She questions the impact of carbon credits in battling climate change. Dr Sarah Milne has worked on conservation and development issues for twenty years, both in Northern Australia and Southeast Asia. Although her initial training was in Engineering, she later gained her PhD in Geography from the University of Cambridge (2010). Sarah now specializes in the field of political ecology, which enables her to explore the politics of green intervention in practice, as well as complicated struggles over natural resources – as reflected in her current Australian Research Council funded project on “rupture” with colleagues at the ANU. The bulk of Sarah’s fieldwork has taken place in Cambodia, where global conservation organisations try to conserve forests and biodiversity. In this context, Sarah studies what happens in practice as market mechanisms like REDD+, for reducing emissions through the sale of forest carbon credits, are implemented on the ground. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx