Key points
Damaged ecosystems release carbon instead of storing it. According to the IPCC, about 25% of global greenhouse gas emissions come from activities such as land clearing, crop production, and fertilization. They not only remove CO2 from the atmosphere, but also protect vital carbon sinks, and offer critical co-benefits like biodiversity conservation, flood protection, and cleaner air and water. And they can be implemented immediately and are often more cost-effective, offering "no-regret" benefits for both people and nature.
- How much benefit? Plants take in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through their leaves and absorb water through their roots. Natural natural climate solutions can deliver roughly one-third of the global emissions reductions required to stabilize the climate.
- Essential carbon sink protection and restoration. Forests, peatlands, coastal wetlands (like mangroves) and grasslands are immense natural reservoirs that absorb billions of tons of carbon dioxide. Preventing the destruction of these ecosystems and working to restore them is crucial for avoiding massive emissions.
- Multiple co-benefits (resilience and biodiversity). Beyond carbon, natural climate solutions help communities adapt to climate hazards. They enhance soil health, improve water quality, and provide crucial habitats that protect biodiversity, fostering overall ecosystem resilience.
What are natural climate solutions?
Natural climate solutions are conservation, restoration, and improved land management actions that increase carbon storage or avoid greenhouse gas emissions in forests, wetlands, grasslands, and agricultural lands. When combined with innovations in clean energy and other efforts to decarbonize the world’s economies, natural climate solutions offer some of our best options to mitigate climate change. There are many opportunities to scale up some of the most promising nature-based solutions. Afforestation, reforestation, and forest management and protection can sequester and store the most carbon. Other opportunities include agricultural and grasslands management, and wetlands restoration and protection.
Research published in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences indicates such nature-based solutions will cost less than the future impacts of climate change are expected to cost society - which is more than $100 per ton of CO2 in the atmosphere, and that they can offer up to 37% of the mitigation needed between now and 2030 for a greater than 66% chance of holding warming rise below 2°C.
Solving our climate crisis with the help of nature
While much of the world’s attention is focused on reducing our use of fossil fuels, scientists are telling us that nature-based approaches are essential to solving our climate crisis. They agree:
- We must limit global temperature increases to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels by 2030.
- The reduction of current greenhouse gas emissions from the energy sector alone is unlikely to be able to limit warming to that level. This is because our mitigation efforts started too late to be able to meet this critical threshold by 2030.
It is true that focusing on energy reduction is essential to prevent runaway climate change. But it is equally true that we can adopt conservation and land management strategies that expand, protect, and restore natural systems so they are able to capture and sequester carbon. This is essential to help meet the widely accepted goal of limiting temperatures below 1.5°C.
