Natural Climate Solutions

Research led by The Nature Conservancy and 15 other institutions*, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, demonstrates that nature-based solutions can provide up to 37% of the emission reductions needed by 2030 to keep global temperature increases under 2°C—30% more than previously estimated.

The framework of this study distills nature’s full climate potential into 20 mitigation pathways. The pathways span three biomes—forests, grasslands (including agricultural lands and rangelands) wetlands (including peatlands, seagrass and mangroves) and climate reduction practices based on conservation, restoration and land management.

Their mitigation potential is evaluated under three economic scenarios:

1. no economic restraints for implementation
2. realistic costs for achieving climate goals of <2°C-degree warming
3. only low-cost implementation opportunities

Read our case studies to learn more about natural climate solutions in different geographies and land-use sectors.

Community Mangrove Conservation in Madagascar

For those who live in and around Bay of Assassins on the southwest coast of Madagascar, mangroves are life. They provide food to eat, lumber for houses, jobs for local residents, especially women, and protection from storm surge and sea-level rise. But because of these many uses, along with other threats, mangroves are being lost to deforestation and degradation at alarming rates.

But the mangrove forests aren’t just valuable to the locals in Madagascar. Because of their extraordinary capacity to sequester carbon—sometimes up to four times more per unit area than terrestrial forests—mangroves have value on the international carbon market.

“If this value can be realized and transferred to the people whose livelihoods depend on the exploitation of mangroves, this benefit has the potential to be an incentive for sustainable, locally-led mangrove management,” says Lalao Aigrette, project coordinator for the non-profit Blue Ventures.

In the Bay of Assassins, Blue Ventures is leading a mangrove carbon project called Tahiry Honko, which means “preserving mangroves for sustainable use for future generations.” The project promotes reforestation, the creation of mangrove protected areas, and improved regulations to ensure sustainable use. Importantly, it generates jobs for the local community that aren’t based on the exploitation of mangroves.

Women’s associations and the youth of the community are central to the project. Women are trained to participate in the carbon monitoring activities, as well as reforestation, and robust youth programs insure that everyone understands the importance of mangroves for future generations. These groups are building scientific and technical capacity to account for the amount of carbon stored in Madagascar’s mangrove forests, ‘blue forests’,

The financial benefits from the sale of carbon credits through Plan Vivo will benefit the entire community and will go toward funding much needed community infrastructure like schools, wells and solar electricity.

By engaging local management associations in project planning, management and monitoring, safeguards are being put in place to ensure coastal communities participate meaningfully in blue carbon and gain an equitable share of the benefits.

Reforesting the Lower Mississippi Valley

The bottomland forests of the Lower Mississippi River Valley once covered 24 million acres, a stretch of forest so dense and complete that “a squirrel could go all the way from Illinois to Louisiana without putting its foot on the ground,” says Ronnie Ulmer, Northeast Louisiana Program Manager for the Nature Conservancy. Less than a quarter of that forest remains today, scattered across 50,000 patches of land—the rest of the forest cleared for agriculture and other development. But hardwood forests are returning to the region, thanks to a range of private and public actors, and as the trees grow they will sequester of millions of tons of carbon from the atmosphere.

Carbon-offset credits offer most of the funding for these efforts. Because much of the agricultural land in the region has only marginal productivity, land owners are often willing to sell or reforest their lands if they have other sources of revenue. Companies like GreenTrees and Natural Capital Partners are working with landowners to protect and replant trees, sharing the revenue from the credits with the owners. These efforts are supported by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service and the Lower Mississippi Valley Conservation Committee, a coalition of state-level natural resource offices in the region.

In addition to sequestering carbon, these new forests provide habitat for wildlife in the region, such as the Louisiana black bear—a subspecies that was nearly driven to extinction by habitat loss. The reforested lands also reduce runoff into nearby streams and rivers, trapping the nutrient pollutants that cause the hypoxic “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico.

Wood Construction and Finland’s Timber Industry

While most efforts to decarbonize the world’s economies tend to focus on energy and transportation, there are significant gains to be made in the construction sector. In fact, a report from the United Kingdom’s Department for Business Innovation and Skills estimates that construction influences 47 percent of CO2emissions in the UK. One of the ways to minimize those emissions, perhaps counter-intuitively, is to build more with wood.

The manufacturing of concrete, brick, aluminum and steel accounts for 16 percent of the world’s carbon emissions; that share is even higher if you take into account the fossil fuels used to transport those materials. Wood construction, on the other hand, actively stores carbon in the building, and wood-constructed buildings have lower energy usage (download). Furthermore, because wood is much lighter than steel or concrete, construction projects can be completed more quickly and with less waste and less energy expenditure, resulting in further emissions reductions and a comparable cost for builders and investors.

"Construction is not the only industry that can make greater use of wood," says Matti Mikkola, managing director of the Federation of Finish Woodworking Industries. "In Finland, nearly all the interior finishings of homes are also made from wood, and the range of other products that could switch to wood production is almost unlimited," he says. Wood is one the strongest and most versatile building materials—and, in addition to storing carbon, it is one of the few that is fully recyclable and renewable.

Of course, not all wood carries the same benefits. To have a low carbon footprint, wood products need to be sourced from well-managed natural forests or from sustainable plantations that do not drive clearance or degradation of existing forests. Certification of supply chains is key to ensure that the wood being used has positive consequences for people and planet.

Growing demand for sustainable wood products also presents an economic opportunity for countries like Finland, where 1 in 10 citizens earn their income directly from forestry or related industries and timber products make up 20% of the nation’s exports. More demand for sustainably grown timber products means more green jobs and more incentive to replant and maintain forests, sequestering more carbon from the atmosphere and providing a range of co-benefits, from water filtration to wildlife habitat.