Co-authored by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the Climate Investment Funds (CIF)
As a global society, we are facing critical and interlinked challenges of climate and biodiversity crises. Left unchecked, these dual threats will lead to irreversible loss of nature and habitats. The scale, speed, and severity of the climate crisis is unprecedented, and the need is clear for rapid, sustained, and large-scale greenhouse gas emission (GHG) reductions across all sectors of the global economy is clear.
This World Environment Day, we should take a moment to recognize that our economies, livelihoods, health, and well-being are all fundamentally dependent on nature, especially forests. Our failure to act on biodiversity and ecosystem losses, which both exacerbate and are made more acute by climate change, poses real and increasing environmental, social and economic risks to society. Some developing countries today are facing immediate threats to their way of life.
The good news is nature can offer solutions for both carbon storage and building climate resilience, while also providing benefits to people and biodiversity. Applying Nature-based Solutions (NbS) to climate change is, in fact, at the core of the Nature, People & Climate investment program that the Climate Investment Funds is now deploying in a number of developing countries, starting with Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, Ethiopia, Fiji, Kenya, Namibia, Rwanda, Zambia, and the Zambezi River Basin.
What exactly are NbS?
IUCN has standardized a definition of NbS that was adopted by the United Nations in March 2022. According to this definition, NbS are centered on the protection, sustainable management, and restoration of natural or modified ecosystems and underpinned by benefits that flow from healthy ecosystems. Recently, IUCN and the Climate Investment Funds jointly held a webinar to help partner countries embrace this concept and consider its implementation.
How can NbS contribute to solve the climate crisis?
A range of protection, restoration, and improved land management actions are needed to increase carbon storage and avoided GHG emissions across forests, wetlands, grasslands, and agricultural lands. In a nutshell, NbS can address climate change in three ways. First, by decreasing GHG emissions related to deforestation and land use. Second, by capturing and storing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. And finally, by enhancing the resilience of ecosystems, and as such support societies to adapt to climate hazards such as flooding, sea-level rise, and more frequent and intense droughts, floods, heatwaves, and wildfires.
By working with and enhancing nature, NbS that make use of diverse native species can make a critical contribution towards both climate change adaptation and mitigation while supporting biodiversity conservation, health, poverty eradication, food and water security, and other societal objectives agreed to under the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
NbS could contribute around 30% of the global mitigation by 2030, which is a necessary contribution if we are to ensure no greater than the 1.5˚C temperature rise goal agreed to under the Paris Agreement. Protecting carbon-rich, high-biodiversity ecosystems, such as tropical forests, mangroves and wetlands among others, is a key priority (Cook-Patton et al. 2021).
When designed with ambition and for longevity, NbS can play a powerful role in reducing temperatures in the long term. Protecting intact ecosystems, improving the management of working lands, and restoring degraded ecosystems could deliver emission reductions and removals of between 5–11 GtCO2e per year by 2030.
Scaling up NbS action through forests
The protection, restoration, and sustainable management of forests is vital to sequester carbon and in the healthy functioning of the carbon cycle, and the balanced regulation of the planet’s climate. However, forests also provide many additional ecosystem services that greatly contribute to human health and well-being, including the supply of clean water, food and wood, the source of medicines and pharmaceutical products, and supporting biodiversity.
Forest landscape restoration (FLR) – the first fit-for-purpose NbS – aims to reduce and reverse land degradation in order to restore ecological integrity and enhance human well-being in deforested and degraded forest landscapes. IUCN works with state and civil society members and partners to build thriving, resilient and productive landscapes through a variety of place-based FLR interventions, involving trees and other woody plants including, for example, tree planting, managed natural regeneration, erosion control, riparian restoration, or improved land management. Such techniques are central to several projects implemented through the CIF’s Forest Investment Program, including in countries such as Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire where large swaths of forest have been cleared for commercial crops. Restoration is also an important strategy in several initial concepts proposed for the Nature, People & Climate program vision, for example in Kenya.
FLR is about restoring a whole landscape to meet present and future needs. To offer multiple benefits and land uses over time, FLR relies on active stakeholder engagement and can accommodate a mosaic of different land uses, including agriculture, agroforestry, regenerated forests, managed plantations, and riverside plantings to protect waterways. FLR involves different degrees of human intervention, ranging from planting trees to allowing natural processes of forest succession to occur.
FLR is also at play when restoring natural forests in upper catchments to increase carbon sequestration, while at the same time helping to protect communities downstream from flooding, and protect biodiversity. Agroforestry, or planting trees among crops or crops among trees, helps sequester carbon and provide additional benefits, such as alternative income sources, reduced exposure to heat, drought, floods and erosion, and food and fibre production. In cities, planting trees and increasing green space helps with urban cooling and flood abatement, while storing carbon, mitigating against air pollution, and providing recreation and health benefits.
What happens now?
In 2022, recognizing the need for a more integrated global approach to NbS, the Egyptian COP27 Presidency, the Government of Germany and IUCN developed the ENACT (Enhancing Nature-based Solutions for an Accelerated Climate Transformation) initiative to bring coherence to and strengthen collaboration between existing NbS efforts and partnerships. ENACT is a voluntary coalition of state and non-state actors, co-chaired by Egypt and Germany. IUCN will host the ENACT Secretariat, which will lead the implementation of the initiative.
The Government of Germany and IUCN launched the Bonn Challenge in 2011. This is a global restoration initiative that aims to bring 350 million hectares of deforested and degraded land into restoration by 2030. Achieving this outcome would sequester up to 1.7 billion tonnes CO2e per year, equivalent to 14 percent of global emissions. Over 230 million hectares of restoration pledges have been successfully secured to date. In 2022, IUCN’s Restoration Barometer found that in 18 countries, 14 million hectares are currently under restoration, with countries reporting progress consistent with the FLR principles and NbS. With over US$ 25 billion of funding allocated, and 145 million tonnes CO2e sequestered, additional benefits accruing from these activities include the creation of over 12 million jobs.
But this is not enough. Urgent action is required today to plan, finance, implement, and monitor NbS at scale, and in priority in developing countries, through programs such as CIF’s Nature, People & Climate.
The IUCN Global Standard on Nature-based SolutionsTM, launched in 2020, can be used to design a robust and resilient NbS to address the urgent challenges of climate change and biodiversity loss, sustaining nature and people together, now and into the future. Developed as a facilitative Standard, it is designed to support users to apply, learn and continuously strengthen and improve the effectiveness, sustainability and adaptability of their NbS interventions.
The CIF Nature Series of webinars was started as a direct response to learning demand from partner countries, and features the joint CIF/IUCN session. CIF will ramp up knowledge exchange opportunities on NbS and will soon launch a comprehensive learning platform. The platform will help countries advance their nature-based solutions ambitions with activities such as events (virtual and in-person), peer-to-peer exchanges, and analytical work (case studies and pilot support activities).