Following a litany of conferences and calls that stress the urgency to address climate change, there’s growing interest and investments in nature to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. Protecting and restoring natural ecosystems, such as forests, grasslands, wetlands, farmlands and oceans, could remove at least 10 gigatons of CO2 per year by 2050, according to a 2021 report. Besides cooling our planet, these interventions can prevent floods and droughts, conserve biodiversity and, in some cases, provide for people’s livelihoods. In 2017, researchers proposed 20 conservation and restoration actions, such as coastal restoration, biochar, reforestation and peat restoration, in these natural ecosystems worldwide to prevent greenhouse gas emissions. They called these actions “natural climate solutions (NCS)” and predicted that by 2030, NCS could provide a third of the CO2 mitigation needed to keep global warming below 2° Celsius (3.6° Fahrenheit) by 2030. The study spurred much interest and excitement around natural climate solutions, calling for more than $400 billion in investments in such solutions each year. However, with that surging interest came confusion and controversy among researchers, policymakers, conservation practitioners and investors regarding what actually constitutes a “natural climate solution.” “There’s been a concomitant rise in confusion and controversy arising from not clearly circumscribing the boundaries of what a natural climate solution is and what it’s not,” says Peter Ellis from The Nature Conservancy (TNC), who was one of the authors of the 2017 study. “When [NCS as a name] gets used in different ways, it makes it harder to mobilize…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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