Unlock nature’s potential to mitigate climate change with naturebase

We are developing the science to address two critical questions that must be answered to realize the potential of Natural Climate Solutions: Precisely where should we focus our efforts, and exactly what interventions have the highest likelihood of success? Research has shown how much nature can do: forests, agricultural lands, grasslands and wetlands cost-effectively capture 11 billion metric tons of CO2e per year, a full third of the solution needed to stabilize our climate by 2030.

NCS are divided into over twenty different pathways to action, including avoided forest conversion, climate-smart forestry, reforestation and agroforestry, regenerative agriculture, and protection or restoration of grasslands, peatlands and coastal wetlands. Naturebase will map out of these pathways at high resolution, specifying where the largest climate mitigation opportunities occur, and under what conditions. It will highlight operational protocols and methodologies to ensure projects achieve measurable climate mitigation. And it will showcase on-the-ground research that fills critical knowledge gaps.

Natural Climate Solutions (NCS) practitioners must take bold steps to ensure that projects not only avoid adverse human rights impacts but actively promote Indigenous People and Local Communities (IP&LCs) rights, self-determination, well-being, and equity, including full entitlement to benefits. The broader NCS community must strive to do this not only because it is the right thing to do, but also because it will ensure the long-term viability and sustainability of NCS projects. This Human Rights Screening Tool, sponsored by The Nature Conservancy, provides a process that will help field teams identify project risks from a human rights-based perspective and prioritize those risks for further attention and collaborative action. It represents a first step to fulfil the larger responsibility of human rights due diligence.

Natural Climate Solutions (NCS) can deliver benefits to biodiversity, human adaptation to climate change, and human well-being in addition to their carbon mitigation benefit. Understanding how these additional benefits vary by NCS intervention, local context, population, country, and other factors is critical to identifying areas where NCS implementation can have the greatest outcomes and tradeoffs. We are systematically identifying the evidence-base on additional NCS benefits, generating new evidence on the biodiversity, adaptation, and human well-being co-benefits for NCS interventions.

We are doing this through multiple interrelated projects including:

• Showing the ranked impact of several NCS pathways on seven ecosystem services: nitrogen retention, sediment retention, water quality, pollination, coastal protection, green water storage, and water availability.
• A machine learning-based systematic evidence map of more than 200,000 scientific articles on the biodiversity and human well-being co-benefits of NCS – Coming soon.
• Estimating the global contribution of several NCS pathways to improving and maintaining landscape connectivity – Coming soon.

Together, these products provide foundational evidence needed by decision-makers to determine whether and how NCS implementation serves as an instrumental tool in advancing the well-being of both nature and people.

We have a unique opportunity to drive significant political commitment and finance towards sustainable land-use on a livable planet. Governments have the power to unlock the incredible potential of Natural Climate Solutions (NCS) and Nature-based Solutions (NbS). To build a nature-positive future, we must integrate Natural Climate Solutions into decision-making. Naturebase will identify effective government initiatives and public policies that support nature by linking existing government initiatives to specific geographies, including legislation, subsidies, budget allocations, and incentive programs.

As the world increasingly understands the potential of Natural Climate Solutions, there has been unprecedented momentum on both public and private funding sources to fill the ambition versus implementation gap. In this context, a new financial tool was developed to highlight a recent study identifying finance gaps and opportunities for high-impact Natural Climate Solutions implementation.

Building on the expertise of on-the-ground practitioners Naturebase will highlight a growing Natural Climate Solutions learning network, designed to evaluate high-impact strategies that can be scaled and replicated around the world. The NCS Prototyping Network brings together field staff and scientists from existing projects in diverse ecosystems. Each project is a means to field test the impact and efficacy of different approaches.

Local project teams from across The Nature Conservancy are working together with the global climate team to generate foundational data in understudied systems, expand monitoring activities, assess feasibility, measure mitigation and co-benefits, evaluate project impact, advance equitable implementation, and identify opportunities to scale. Data and case studies from pilot projects will be available to researchers and decision-makers around the world through the development of innovative tools and data. The network also provides a cross-project community of learning and collaboration and a constant feedback loop to improve implementation through adaptive management.

Naturebase will provide the most comprehensive compilation natural climate solution projects already underway. See projects in your area of interest. Identify trends and gaps. Stimulate learning, and share successes.

Naturebase is a product of collaborative effort across the scientific community, nonprofit organizations, intergovernmental agencies and others dedicated to the mission of unlocking nature’s potential to address the climate and biodiversity crises. Our beta version includes the option to provide feedback and submit ideas, where users can contribute to shaping the platform and helping us make it just the right tool for enabling action everywhere in the world.

Science has shown the immense potential of Natural Climate Solutions, but we know comparatively little about what impedes action. Naturebase will leverage from the largest ever global survey of these feasibility constraints such as lack of access to capital, insufficient training, perverse incentives or market forces, or governance barriers.

Understanding where these constraints occur and how they relate to implementation will guide decision-makers to target investment where interventions are most likely to achieve near-term climate change mitigation at the lowest cost to society. But it will also provide the information necessary for developing targeted interventions that can remove the most persistent barriers over the longer term.