This Climate Week, Let’s Tackle Nature’s Biggest Challenges
According to a recent analysis published in One Earth, human activity has depleted the carbon stored in vegetation and soils by one quarter, releasing an astonishing 344 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere – roughly equivalent to all the fossil fuels that have been burned over the past fifty years.
The silver lining is that natural ecosystems that are still intact store more carbon than all fossil fuel reserves combined. Clearly, how we manage natural systems has a massive impact on climate change. And yet, natural climate solutions (NCS), or mechanisms to alter and improve our management of natural systems to both maintain existing carbon stocks and remove more carbon from the atmosphere, receive far less attention (and funding) than measures to reduce the use of fossil fuels.
Even more surprising, many standards and frameworks in the climate space actively discourage the use of NCS as a mechanism—not because they dispute the underlying science on the importance of protecting and restoring natural systems, but rather because of perceived uncertainties surrounding the measurement of NCS that make it challenging to fit them cleanly into carbon accounting frameworks. Things like additionality, permanence, and leakage all come to the forefront in the arguments against investing in and scaling NCS.
As we all prepare for another Climate Week in New York, we must keep science in the forefront of our minds; and science tells us that there is no possible path to limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 or even 2 degrees without both drastic reductions to our use of fossil fuels and unprecedented action to protect and restore natural systems. This means that those of us working on NCS must address these perceived measurement uncertainties and convince policymakers that nature can and indeed must fit into their policy frameworks.
The good news is that we’ve already made leaps and bounds in doing just that—just read my colleague John Ringer’s latest piece on the progress in additionality and baselines already underway. But permanence and leakage continue to be a thorn in the side of those of us making NCS work for people and the planet. Fortunately for us, leaders in conservation and climate have taken these challenges head-on, ready to debunk the idea that NCS are not worth scaling.
Progress in Permanence
Permanence refers to the length of time a tonne of carbon dioxide, which has been sequestered and/or stored in a natural system through human action, will stay in that natural system before being re-released into the atmosphere. It is an important concept because in many policy frameworks governments or companies would like to use NCS to compensate for, neutralize, or “offset” fossil fuel emissions that they have not yet been able to reduce. When they do, a key question arises: will the carbon they sequester and/or store in a neutral system persist in that system for as long as the fossil fuel emission will persist in the atmosphere? If not, can NCS really compensate for fossil emissions?
At first glance, there are lots of reasons to expect that the answer to this question might be “no.” After all, forests and other natural systems burn down in wildfires or are cleared for agriculture or residential development. But we know that natural systems are physically capable of storing carbon dioxide for millennia. What we are concerned about therefore is not their ability but rather the risks to those systems that might prevent them from doing so over time.
The good news is, we as humans have lots of experience identifying and managing risks over time. Inspired by models from other sectors, such as insurance products and university endowments, a new generation of approaches to managing non-permanence risks to NCS are rapidly emerging. These include buffer pools, liability management, tonne-year accounting, and new approaches like the Permanence Trust.
What all these systems have in common is the notion of transferring the responsibility for monitoring and managing carbon stored in NCS to third parties custom-built for that purpose. These parties will carry forward that responsibility indefinitely, managing the risk where possible and compensating for reversals of stored carbon where appropriate. When mature, these approaches will mean a tonne of carbon sequestered and/or stored in nature will be just as durable as other forms of climate action.
Learning in Leakage
The concept of leakage represents the actions that might occur outside of a project based on what happens inside a project. If we protect an acre of forest through a conservation easement, the desire to build houses doesn’t magically disappear. The negative impact we’re preventing in our project – deforestation, in this example – might simply pop up, or “leak,” elsewhere, outside of our project. This has been well understood theoretically for decades. However, mechanisms for accurately measuring and mitigating leakage have been underdeveloped. That is on the verge of changing.
By using global econometric models, scientists are now able to estimate, with increasing precision, leakage effects, allowing us to account for them within climate frameworks. These new methods will begin to be introduced and used over the coming years.
Even more important, this same research will identify mechanisms to not only measure but also to mitigate leakage impacts. For example, if we reduce harvesting in a forest and therefore displace timber demand elsewhere, one way to mitigate that impact is to establish more working forests in some other location to replace – in part or in full – that decreased timber production. Another way to mitigate leakage impacts is to increase the number of landowners practicing active, sustainable management, which can produce more timber while maintaining timber stocks and other environmental values over time. This is an especially powerful intervention in a country like the United States, where the largest share of forests is owned by families and individuals, very few of whom have access to the professional forestry expertise necessary to manage in this way.
Conclusion
Beyond these accounting and measurement challenges, we have many other challenges to solve to activate Natural Climate Solutions at the scale necessary to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, including new financing mechanisms and developing universal standards of quality and integrity. But the science of NCS is already sound and improving all the time. Within the next few years, we will have addressed the perceived weaknesses of NCS and paced the way for their inclusion in policies, frameworks and standards around the world, establishing them as a valid and indeed vital mechanism for urgent climate action. This is what makes this year’s Climate Week so exciting: it’s a chance to take the action needed now to address today’s challenges for a more sustainable, resilient world tomorrow.