Thomson Reuters Foundation - OpEd

June 28, 2021
As countries and companies make net-zero promises, nature’s role in absorbing carbon and offsetting emissions has received increasing attention. 

Investing in nature - or so called nature-based solutions - is seen by players from oil majors, agricultural giants to local governments as the key to removing carbon and achieving net-zero.

Carbon removal, or negative emissions, is now central to most net-zero pledges.

For my community, the Maasai pastoralists of Kenya, nature-based solutions are nothing new: ensuring that nature remains intact has always been a central part of how we operate.

Our traditional nature-based solutions have long been recognized as one of the most effective means of restoring ecosystem health and reversing degradation in drylands. In maintaining healthy ecosystems, we have ensured that forests can hold and capture more carbon, helping keep emissions down.

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Borneo Bulletin

June 22, 2021
The United Kingdom (UK) COP26 Presidency and the ASEAN Centre for Biodiversity (ACB) recently co-convened ‘ASEAN-UK COP26: Framing the Future for Nature and Climate’, a virtual event exploring the important role that ecosystems, like forests, wetlands, and marine and coastal areas, play in combatting climate change.

The event discussed best practices and experiences from across the ASEAN region, and discussed the need to scale up ambition on nature-based solutions on climate and biodiversity. In addition, the event showcased the findings of the ‘Dasgupta Review on the Economics of Biodiversity’, and the applicability of its findings to the ASEAN region.

It was also an opportunity to bring the region together in preparation for the regional and global meetings, including the Third ASEAN Conference on Biodiversity, the 15th Conference of Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, and the 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), all taking place this year, with the UK presiding over COP26, in partnership with Italy.

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Mongabay

June 4, 2021
Nature-based solutions to tackle the climate crisis, specifically through the global carbon market, are attracting major public and private investment. Yet, according to new research by the NGO Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) and Canada’s McGill University, most tropical forested countries looking to benefit from these markets still need to define the rights of Indigenous peoples, local communities and Afro-descendant peoples over carbon in their customary lands and territories.

If these rights are not meaningfully recognized, the researchers argue, the viability of these nature-based solutions will be fundamentally threatened.

RRI has tracked the land rights of Indigenous communities throughout the world for two decades. This latest research is in the context of a global task force established to rapidly expand voluntary carbon markets. Major international corporations like Amazon, Unilever, Salesforce, Airbnb and Nestlé, as part of the LEAF coalition, are pushing to mobilize at least $1 billion using Architecture for REDD+ Transactions (ART) to tackle deforestation and forest degradation.

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Aljazeera - OpEd

June 2, 2021
Humanity faces a herculean task to reverse climate change and protect the natural world that supports us. We must retool human society to live in harmony with nature – all while leaving space for people in developing nations to prosper and grow.

We want this to happen immediately. But we must be realistic. Even if everyone starts immediately to turn their promises on climate change and nature loss into action – as they should and must – we are looking at decades of work.

To buy time to complete these transformations, particularly the transition to zero-carbon economies, we need fast-acting and simple solutions. Solutions that slow climate change, restore nature and biodiversity, protect us against pandemics, allow us to produce more food, create jobs, reduce inequalities, build peace.

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World Economic Forum

May 27, 2021
Unsustainable economic growth has had devastating consequences for ecosystems that are under threat from climate change, species extinction and water insecurity. And now it's time for a rethink of our relationship with nature.

Approximately $133 billion is invested annually in nature-based solutions (Nbs), according to a new report - State of Finance for Nature: Tripling investments in nature-based solutions by 2030 - from the United Nations and World Economic Forum.

Domestic government bodies are responsible for the largest proportion of today’s Nbs – $113 billion – aimed at protecting biodiversity and landscapes, and conducting activities like sustainable forestry. The private sector contributes a further $18 billion to fund sustainable supply chains and environmental offsets.

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Wired

May 25, 2021
The biggest hint nature ever gave humanity was when it sequestered fossil fuels underground, locking their carbon away from the atmosphere. Only rarely, like when a massive volcano fires a layer of coal into the sky, does that carbon escape its confines to dramatically warm the planet.

But such catastrophes hint at a powerful weapon for fighting climate change: Let nature do its carbon-sequestering thing. By restoring forests and wetlands, humanity can bolster the natural processes that trap atmospheric carbon in vegetation. As long as it all doesn’t catch on fire (or a volcano doesn’t blow it up), such “nature-based solutions,” as climate scientists call them, can help slow global warming.

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Nature

May 12, 2021
Projects that manage, protect and restore ecosystems are widely viewed as win–win strategies for addressing two of this century’s biggest global challenges: climate change and biodiversity loss. Yet the potential contribution of such nature-based solutions to mitigating climate change remains controversial.

Decision-makers urgently need to know: what role do nature-based solutions have in the race to net-zero emissions and stop further global temperature increases?

Analyses of nature-based solutions often focus on how much carbon they can remove from the atmosphere. Here, we provide a new perspective by modelling how these solutions will affect global temperatures — a crucial metric as humanity attempts to limit global warming.

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Inside Climate News

May 5, 2021
No matter how many solar panels, wind turbines and electric cars are built between now and 2030, the world won’t meet its increasingly ambitious climate targets without a lot of help from forests, fields and oceans. 

“Achieving net-zero by 2050 will not be possible without nature,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said on April 22 at the online climate summit hosted by President Joe Biden as she opened a session on nature-based climate solutions. “The impact of greenhouse gas pollution from extreme heat and storms is having a devastating effect on our lands and oceans. At the same time, nature provides us with solutions.” 

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PHYS.ORG

May 4, 2021
Nature-based Solutions (NbS) could support transformative change in environmental sustainability—to address major societal challenges, including the climate crisis—according to a new paper from Oxford researchers.

But, the team warns, there must be a move away from the narrow framing of what nature can 'do' for society to an integrated approach, where solutions are understood as place-based, activated by people in partnership with nature.

This issue has real world implications for the way nature becomes an integrated part of the response to environmental challenges. For example, positioning the action of tree planting as simply a way to mitigate climate change, rather than a dynamic relationship between people and nature, is over simplistic. This is not conducive to transformative change and perpetuates a separation between people and nature.

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Mongabay

April 29, 2021
Combining data from ground-based techniques and remote monitoring using airborne devices offers new opportunities to monitor nature-based solutions (NbS) to mitigate floods, droughts, heatwaves, landslides, storm surges and coastal erosion, according to a new study.

According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, NbS are actions to protect, sustainably manage, and restore natural and modified ecosystems that address societal challenges effectively and adaptively, simultaneously providing “human well-being and biodiversity benefits.” Since 2008, nature-based solutions (NbS) have emerged in the field of disaster risk reduction (DRR) and climate change adaptation (CCA) as a resource and cost-efficient measure to complement the limitations linked with the grey-engineered approach.

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Campaign For Nature

April 27, 2021
Last week, at Biden’s Earth Day Summit, world leaders made bold and sweeping pledges to slash greenhouse gas emissions—a critical step toward achieving the Paris climate agreement. At the same time, heads of state from France, the U.K., Germany, Gabon and Costa Rica, among others speaking at the Summit, made the powerful case that we can’t solve the climate crisis without tackling the biodiversity crisis. 

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Washington Post

April 22, 2021
Spring has returned to the California coast, bringing with it abundant sunshine and calmer seas. Storm-tossed sands settle. Nourishing cold water floods in from offshore. It is time for a climate superhero to emerge.

Giant kelp is among the best organisms on the planet for taking planet-warming gases out of the atmosphere. Buoyed by small, gas-filled bulbs called “bladders,” these huge algae grow toward the ocean surface at a pace of up to two feet per day. Their flexible stems and leafy blades form a dense underwater canopy that can store 20 times as much carbon as an equivalent expanse of terrestrial trees.

And when the fierce waves of winter come and kelp is ripped from its rocky anchors and washed out to the deep sea, that carbon gets buried on the ocean floor. It may stay there for centuries, even millennia, locking away more greenhouse gases than 20 million American homes use in a year.

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The Wilderness Society

April 22, 2021
The Biden administration’s Climate Summit started today with a bang: The president pledged to reduce the country’s greenhouse gas emissions almost in half by 2030. The plan is ambitious but critical as the climate crisis gets progressively worse, with 2020 ranking as one of the hottest years on record. As we aim to reach this goal, a vital part of the strategy should be to implement nature-based solutions on public lands.

For centuries, humans have been burning fossil fuels to power our lives. This process has released an excessive amount of gases into the atmosphere that are heating up the planet. We’re now living with the consequences, including more severe and frequent wildfires, floods, hurricanes and droughts.

There’s no easy way out of this crisis. We need to dramatically reduce climate change emissions coming from cars, trucks, power plants, and other sources. But that’s not enough. To be successful, we must eliminate carbon emissions that are already lingering in the air, not to mention ensure humans and wildlife can adapt to the climate change impacts knocking on our doors. Nature-based solutions, such as protecting and expanding wildlands can help.

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European Environment Agency

April 15, 2021
Climate change, biodiversity loss and degradation of ecosystems are linked and all have devastating consequences for our economic and social stability, health and well-being. Working with nature is increasingly recognised as an efficient way to tackle these growing challenges, according the new EEA report ‘Nature-based solutions in Europe: Policy, knowledge and practice for climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction.’

The EEA report provides up-to-date information for policymakers on the how to apply nature-based solutions for climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction and at the same time making use of multiple societal benefits that these solutions can bring. Drawing on selected examples across Europe, the report shows how impacts of extreme weather and climate-related events are already tackled in this way. It also assesses global and European policies and how nature-based solutions are increasingly being integrated in the efforts to shift towards sustainable development.

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Los Angeles Times - OpEd

April 11, 2021
The frequency of natural disasters has soared in recent decades. Total damage topped $210 billion worldwide in 2020. With climate change, the costs attributed to coastal storms will increase dramatically.

At the same time, coastal habitats such as wetlands and reefs are being lost rapidly. Some 20% of the world’s mangroves were lost over the last four decades. More than half of the Great Barrier Reef was degraded by bleaching in 2020 alone. In California, we have lost more than 90% of our coastal marshes.

Coastal habitats serve as a critical first line of defense, and their loss puts communities at even greater risk from coastal flooding. Coral reefs work as natural breakwaters and reduce flooding by breaking waves offshore. Wetlands such as marshes and mangroves protect coastlines by dampening storm surge and waves; they also prevent erosion and can build new land.

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