Why Nature Offers the Best and Most Immediate Fix for Climate Change
By Chandler Van Voorhis
Managing Partner and Co-Founder of GreenTrees
At the 27th Conference of the Parties to the Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP27) in November, the Biden administration announced America is going “all-in” on nature-based solutions to fight climate change. It released its “roadmap” that places nature-based solutions at the center of U.S. climate policy, with key recommendations for federal agencies to support nature-based solutions.
Nature-based solutions generally refer to protecting, restoring or better managing nature as a means to addressing ecosystems like forests or grasslands that provide various benefits, such as water purification and flood control. Most commonly, nature-based solutions appear in the context of climate change and its symptoms of increased intensity and frequency of storms and heat waves. Nature-based solutions target different ways to reduce emissions, including protecting old-growth trees that store immense amounts of carbon or helping farmers keep more carbon locked in their soil.
The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) states that planting trees is the fastest solution with the lowest risk for combating climate change on a large scale. According to NAS, reforestation offers the most climate mitigation benefits today as well as outperforms other options such as natural forest management, improved plantations, avoided wood fuel and fire management.
Nature-based carbon removals, i.e., reforestation, are the only currently scalable technology for repairing the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions. By effectively pulling carbon out of the Earth’s atmosphere, trees, grasses and soil can recalibrate the atmosphere, hence the term “carbon removal.” Technical removals, such as direct air capture of CO2, are nowhere near scaling to the amount needed to make a noticeable contribution yet. So while renewable technologies can reduce emissions going forward, how does society pull carbon out of the atmosphere? Trees, grasses and soil, which can take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, are favored because of carbon removal.
In his remarks at COP27, President Biden said, “Preserving nature is one of the most impactful climate solutions we have.… We just have to make clear forests are more valuable when they’re preserved than when they’re destroyed. It’s that basic.” He makes the key point about nature-based solutions — where deforestation is driven by financial incentives — If you cut down a tree, you can sell the wood to buy things and plant, say, crops in its place. What carbon reforestation can do is change the math by creating financial incentives for protecting forests, essentially making the trees more valuable alive than dead. By paying landowners to keep carbon-absorbing forests alive, you compensate for carbon pollution created elsewhere while also protecting wildlife and local communities.
Because carbon pricing helps to incentivize landowners to protect and plant trees, this becomes one way companies fund actions that protect nature. A common misconception about forestry-based offsets is that future emission reductions are already claimed today because it takes decades for a tree to grow and reach its full carbon sequestration potential. But offset credits are only issued after a tree has already stored the amount of carbon dioxide in its biomass. Once this amount is measured, documented and then verifed, it ensures carbon benefits are realized today and not in the future.
Organizations that issue carbon credits for forest projects follow an extensive protocol to ensure that climate benefits are delivered. Enrolling a forestry project on the American Carbon Registry represents an effective, legally binding and public-facing commitment to long-term carbon sequestration where it previously was absent. It is a tangible, firm and immediate action to increase and directly quantify carbon sequestration according to a peer reviewed and published framework. Each project must exceed all currently effective laws and regulations as well as common practice management of similar forests in the region and each one must face at least one of three barriers — financial, technical or institutional — to their implementation.
Revenues from carbon offsets support reforestation, sustainable forest management and prevention of conversion of forests to non-forest uses. They also help to ensure forests remain healthy and productive, and support efforts to acquire and conserve additional lands. Ultimately, forest carbon projects attach a tangible monetary asset to carbon sequestration where timber and/or mineral extraction were previously the only revenue sources from forests.
Planting trees and minimizing further forest loss are essential to preventing a further rise in global mean temperature. The Nature Conservancy, World Resources Institute and other NGOs estimate that the combined climate impact of halting deforestation, restoring forestland and improving forestry practices could reduce and remove as much as seven billion metric tons of carbon dioxide each year. This would represent more than one-third of the climate mitigation required to meet 2030 goals.
Planting trees helps repair the atmosphere by removing carbon while delivering additional benefits of improving water quality, stabilizing soil erosion, generating new wildlife habitats, improving air quality, creating new jobs, and helping many farmers conserve their land.
