COP27: Toward a Positive Tipping Point for Nature-based Solutions?
By Emily Dahl
To limit average global temperature rise within 1.5 degrees Celsius and avoid the worst impacts of climate change, the world needs to invest in cost-effective, proven solutions for mitigation and resilience, which should include significant investments in nature-based solutions (NBS). Leading international researchers found that between 2017 and 2030, activities around conservation, restoration, and improved land management could increase carbon storage and/or avoid greenhouse gas emissions to provide 37 percent of cost-effective CO2 mitigation toward the two degree target. The Paris Agreement itself recognizes the importance of conservation for mitigation and promotes international trading of credits generated from natural carbon sinks such as forests.
Investments in NBS can also complement sustainable economic development. A 2021 report estimates that 11.4% of global infrastructure needs over the next 20 years could be provided by nature-based infrastructure. This “green” infrastructure can be over 50% more cost effective than traditional “grey” infrastructure, while providing co-benefits such as climate resilience, reduction of energy use and air pollution, and improvements to human health and well-being, to name a few.
Finance for NBS is currently woefully inadequate. Experts find that G20 countries’ contributions alone should be more than doubled from $120 billion to $285 billion by 2050 to effectively address interconnected land degradation, nature, and climate crises. But the progress on display throughout the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change 27th Conference of the Parties (COP27) in NBS should engender optimism. The new Forest and Climate Leaders’ Partnership and financial pledges that follow the Glasgow Deforestation Pledge demonstrated stakeholders’ commitments to advancing that vital COP26 initiative, while other COP27 Leaders’ Events and dozens of side events featured government officials and civil society representatives sharing case studies of current initiatives, unveiling new efforts, and announcing related funding.
The elements for success in financing and accelerating NBS deployment appear to be on the table, with many rapidly increasing in sophistication and credibility. Drawing on the initiatives and perspectives shared at COP27, here are three key measures that could propel NBS to the levels needed to help avoid catastrophic climate change and its associated impacts.
1. Invest in data gathering, technology platforms, and robust standards that can enable monitoring and verification of NBS.
Some experts suggest that “nature-based solutions” and related terms are far too vague, enabling haphazard corporate or government labeling of projects with unverified carbon benefits that don’t adhere to environmental and social safeguards.
Clearer terminology and quantification of project outcomes are both essential for private and public capital investors to inspire the necessary confidence to finance up-front NBS project costs, provide low-cost debt, or generate high-integrity carbon credits to trade in voluntary or future global regulated carbon markets.
Increasingly granular monitoring and verification of carbon storage and emissions over time can be achieved via data-rich, technologically advanced initiatives like World Resources Institute’s Land and Carbon Lab and the newly debuted Climate TRACE. ART TREES, a rigorous emission reduction and removal verification standard with strict accounting, environmental, and social requirements, is helping countries like Guyana that are working to reduce deforestation and sell high-integrity carbon credits.
Linking quantifiable mitigation values to NBS can help incentivize public and private sector activity while addressing concerns regarding the seriousness of these initiatives.
2. Take a people-centered approach to scaling NBS—without losing sight of ecosystems and biodiversity.
Another justified critique is that, rather than recognizing the intrinsic value of nature, the concept of nature-based solutions commodifies forests and other ecosystems while discarding the importance of biodiversity to focus solely on how nature supports human aims like climate change mitigation. Indigenous and local communities can be excluded from this interpretation of NBS, and ecosystems can continue to suffer worldwide losses of non-human species.
At COP27, indigenous peoples frequently cited the need for legal recognition and titled land rights so they can continue and expand their traditions of sustainable land stewardship that promotes biodiversity, and to repel outside attempts to exploit their territories for deforestation or culturally insensitive “conservation” initiatives. NGOs and philanthropic initiatives increasingly recognize the importance of serving as partners to indigenous and local communities, rather than merely consulting with them. Conservation International’s new human-centric roadmap for natural climate solutions includes a track devoted to accelerating legal recognition of indigenous and local land rights globally.
One corporate-boosted “nature-based” technology area, bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), should be treated with caution and constrained to certain contexts, such as utilizing agricultural waste from existing agricultural lands—versus justifying conversion of natural forests into agroforestry or agriculture for bioenergy. Indeed, at the outset of COP27, legal experts warned that BECCS poses significant threats to indigenous peoples’ rights along with broader societal hazards.
As case studies throughout COP27 demonstrated, supportive NBS partnerships that center indigenous and local community needs and concerns—and that support women’s important roles in designing and implementing solutions—can result in “triple bottom line” social, environmental, and economic benefits.
3. Explore new models for generating gains for the climate, nature, and people.
As international carbon markets and funding mechanisms for climate-positive conservation are still being developed and implemented, innovative commitments from all areas of society can help shape the future of nature-based solutions.
The Nature Conservancy and Inter-American Development Bank’s “blue bonds” project with Barbados, shared at COP27, enables Barbados to convert USD 150 million in sovereign debt to protect approximately 30 percent of its marine areas—up from nearly zero—for climate and economic resilience. Tailored debt-for-climate dealshave yielded successes in multiple countries and show promise as models for nature-based climate development aid.
Cities can look to plans like Phoenix, Arizona’s to create “cool corridors” where tree planting can reduce urban heat islands and help reduce the need for air conditioning while avoiding heat mortality for the city’s heat-vulnerable neighborhoods.
At the national level, Germany played a leadership role on financial commitments for nature at COP27, and the new U.S. plan to conserve global forests as critical carbon sinks with USD 9 billion by 2030 could inspire others to act, if pledges can translate into congressional appropriations and real support for developing nations.
Each effort can bring the world a step closer to achieving climate goals, but over the next several years, financial flows and project implementation will need to rapidly increase.
A Paris Agreement for nature?
Closely following COP27, the UN Convention on Biodiversity (CBD) will hold COP15 in Montreal this December. Executive Secretary Elizabeth Maruma Mrema has called for a “Paris moment for biodiversity,” including protecting 30 percent of land and sea globally by 2030. The biodiversity focus of this conference can help reinforce the concept that quantifying NBS should not be equated with reducing nature to a purely economic commodity. Rather, COP15 should underscore the fact that NBS can only be deemed successful if we holistically integrate biodiversity, human rights, climate, and environmental goals with measurable outcomes.
The momentum from COP27 leading into CBD’s COP15 offers stakeholders an unparalleled opportunity to unite international political and financial will to accelerate the adoption of verifiable nature-based initiatives. With proper design and implementation that includes data-driven monitoring and evaluation, a people-centered approach, and new gains-generating models, nature-based initiatives can serve their important role as part of global efforts to contain climate change and its impacts.
Emily Dahl’s work focuses on advancing inclusive, equitable, and environmentally sustainable pathways for meeting Paris Agreement targets and enhancing climate resilience. Her experience spans the public, private, and nonprofit sectors, most recently with the MIT Energy Initiative. She is graduating in early 2023 from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University with a mid-career master’s degree in international development and environmental policy.
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