We can do many things to tackle climate change: We can reduce our consumption. We can also switch to renewable energy and develop new, sustainable technlogies. And we can stop eating meat. But we often forget that nature-based solutions for climate change are among the most important ones to tackle key sustainability challenges.
In this article, you’ll find out everything you need to know about nature-based solutions for climate change. You’ll also get to know 3 examples of nature-based solutions that can have a huge impact to change the world.
What are Nature-Based Solutions for Climate Change?
Nature-based solutions to climate change, involve conserving, restoring, or better managing ecosystems to remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere.
These ecosystems reduce climate change by capturing CO2 from the air and sequestering it in plants, soils, and sediments. They also provide a wide range of other important benefits, such as cleaner air and water, economic benefits, and increased biodiversity, food and water security, and disaster risk reduction.
Examples include allowing forests to regrow, restoring coastal wetlands, and switching to restorative agricultural practices, such as cover crop rotation, that support healthy soils. From protecting salt marshes to restoring forest habitats, nature-based solutions are already in operation across the world.
That way, nature-based solutions harness the power of nature to boost natural ecosystems, biodiversity and human well-being to address major societal issues, including climate change.
Indigenous peoples and local communities have used nature-based solutions for milenia. It is crucial that all solutions are people-centered, led by communities and draw from traditional and local knowledge. Nature-based solutions must be inclusive, transparent, developed with respect to land rights and respect to local people’s views and the benefits should be equally distributed.
By the way, did you know that many local communities depend on zoos as an economic source? Read here whether zoos should be banned or not.
Some nature-based solutions, such as conserving existing wetlands, serve mainly to prevent greenhouse gas emissions. Others, such as restorative agriculture and regrowing clear-cut forests, actively remove CO2 from the atmosphere. This makes them a form of carbon removal.
Nature-based approaches to carbon removal are often portrayed as distinct from “engineered” approaches, such as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, direct air capture with carbon storage, and ocean alkalinization.
The distinction between nature-based solutions for climate change and engineered approaches, which some scholars have contested, has important implications for the politics of carbon removal: publics are generally more supportive of approaches perceived as “natural.”
Why do we need Nature-Based Solutions for Climate Change?
Our planet is facing a triple global challenge of biodiversity loss, climate change and equitable development. Around a million animal and plant species are now threatened with extinction – more than ever before in human history. And the climate emergency is exposing millions of people to extreme heat waves, threatening food and water supplies, and could leave a billion people negatively affected by sea-level rise within decades, among several other impacts.
At the same time, half of the world’s GDP depends on the efficient and sustainable use of natural assets and its services in sectors such as agriculture, fisheries, forestry and tourism.
Nature-based solutions are an opportunity to address these problems and ensure a nature positive future by providing essential services such as carbon storage, ensuring food and water supplies and buffering against the impacts of a warming world. Finally, they are not only a way to mitigate the risks associated to climate change, but also a way to adapt to the changing global weather patterns.
Do Nature-Based Solutions Help Fight Climate Change?
Estimates suggest that nature-based solutions can provide 37% of the mitigation needed until 2030 to achieve the targets of the Paris Agreement. So we clearly cannot do without them! But how can this be done?
If you plant trees, they’re going to soak up carbon. For example, restoring native forest at the margins of the river to avoid landslides can also act as a carbon sink. Climate-smart agriculture is another example that enables farmers to retain more carbon in their fields as they produce crops. Decreasing deforestation is another way to benefit from nature-based solutions – for example, by paying farmers not to cut down the forest preserves ecosystem services such as carbon sequestration, provision of clean drinking water, and reduction of river sedimentation downstream.
Nature-based solutions for climate change also play a key role in climate change adaptation and building resilience in landscapes and communities. They are also a cost-effective way of addressing global warming while also addressing biodiversity and land degradation. Applying these solutions, you can address several problems at once, while maintaining and even encouraging positive human environment interaction.
But it’s not automatic that everything you plant becomes a nature-based solution that contributes to biodiversity – for example, planting trees that are not from the region and are toxic to local animals would not generate biodiversity benefits.
Types of Nature-Based Solutions for Climate Change
Nature-based solutions span a wide range of practices, and people sometimes disagree about exactly what counts as a nature-based solution.
Broadly speaking, nature-based solutions for climate change fall into four categories:
- forestry practices
- wetland-related practices
- restorative agriculture
- ocean-based practices
Forestry practices include planting new forests, allowing forests to regrow naturally where they have been cut down, and improved forest management.
Wetland-related practices focus on conserving and restoring peatlands and coastal wetlands, such as mangroves.
In turn, restorative agriculture ranges from practices that build soil carbon, such as no-till agriculture and cover crop rotation, to agroforestry and improved livestock management.
Finally, ocean-based practices include restoring seagrass meadows or growing shellfish, kelp or seaweed to restore or expand marine ecosystems.
3 Examples of Nature-Based Solutions for Climate Change
1. Protecting and restoring coral reefs
Healthy coral reefs dissipate wave energy, providing significant protection for low-lying communities and shorelines against flooding, storm surges, and erosion. Several studies found that reefs can be even more effective than human-built breakwaters at reducing the height and energy of waves.
As rising seas and more intense storms push tides higher and farther inland, increasing flood risks for tens of millions of people and threatening local economies, protecting and restoring coral reefs is a smarter—and potentially cheaper—approach than traditional seawalls for bolstering our coastlines.
2. Keeping forests standing
Forests are one of the best examples of nature-based solutions. Home to 80% of the world’s terrestrial biodiversity, forests provide clean air and water, protect against erosion and landslides, and help to regulate the climate by removing carbon from the atmosphere. Primary forests, such as the Amazon, act as significant carbon sinks, sequestering huge amounts of carbon in tree biomass and soils.
By preventing deforestation and degradation, which contribute around 13% of global CO2 emissions, we could significantly reduce carbon emissions while staving off the worst impacts of a warming planet.
3. Building green(er) cities
Urban development replaces forests and wetlands with buildings and nonporous infrastructure. When it rains heavily, stormwater that doesn’t get absorbed can cause severe flooding. That runoff then washes into streams, lakes, or rivers, where it can increase sediments, pollute drinking water, or harm wildlife. Here are the most polluted rivers in the world.
Nature-based solutions for climate change, such as green roofs, rain gardens, or constructed wetlands can minimize damaging runoff by absorbing stormwater, reducing flood risks and safeguarding freshwater ecosystems. In addition, nature-based solutions keep cities cooler during the summer, support birds and other pollinators, and promote people’s mental and physical health.
Green innovations, such as green buildings are the way to go to make our cities more sustainable!
Are nature-based solutions always the best option?
Protecting and restoring coral reefs and mangrove forests, preserving grasslands, and sustainably managing forests are all effective strategies for slowing the rate of climate change and mitigating disaster risk.
Today, more than 130 countries have already included nature-based solution actions in their national climate plans under the Paris Agreement. But nature-based solutions aren’t always the best answer.
For example, planting non-native trees to offset carbon emissions can be detrimental to biodiversity and can even reduce the availability of water, and the potential climate benefits don’t outweigh the cost. It’s important that we make science-driven decisions to apply the right solution in the right place.
And nature-based solutions aren’t the only solutions we should use to help countries, communities, or corporations adapt to climate change.
In other words, addressing the climate crisis means expanding our toolkit. We already know that, to mitigate the impacts of climate change, we must urgently reduce our emissions on a global scale. But it’s becoming clearer that nature must be at the heart of these efforts. And nature-based solutions could be key to unleashing our potential for protecting people and wildlife.
In a warming world, we risk seeing nature only as a threat with its forces arrayed against us. By investing in nature-based solutions for climate change, we get nature on our side too!
