In response to the climate change emergency, policymakers, businesses and communities are seeking powerful, cost-effective solutions to react to a changing world.
Natural Climate Solutions (NCS) have emerged as one answer that gives many people hope, particularly with issues relating to land use, which contributes around a third of global greenhouse gas emissions reductions needed to achieve the 1.5 degrees Celsius Paris Agreement temperature goal. Better land management that harnesses NCS, facilitated by large-scale investments and policy, can help landscape partnerships address massive global challenges like climate change and economic downturns.
NCS were the subject of the conversation during the most recent Landscape Roundtable, the latest installment of an ongoing discussion series sponsored by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization-North America and EcoAgriculture Partners. During the October 5, 2021 roundtable on “Connecting Natural Climate Solutions with Integrated Landscape Management,” panelists laid out their foundational work on NCS. Speakers offered tools and perspectives that could help local groups worldwide link climate work to what they are doing within their landscapes.
The roundtable featured discussions focusing on agriculture, landscapes and climate change and attracted more than 160 participants from 46 countries. View the event recording, and the notes, tools and resources shared in the chat.
Jocelyn Hall, the director of FAO-North America, started the conversation by arguing that landscape-scale climate solutions address climate challenges in a multifaceted and holistic way.
“Food and agriculture have to be central to climate solutions to face the climate challenges we have today,” Hall said. Holistic NCS in agriculture “should be prioritized for their cost-effectiveness and long-term approach to sustainable land and water resources management.”
NCS’s role across landscapes
The meeting brought together experts developing landscape-level climate action by engaging with the public and private sectors. Panelists discussed the lessons they’ve learned, essential tools and policy barriers to implementing and supporting NCS within and across landscapes.
“Everyone’s eyes are on solutions to the climate emergency,” said Sara Scherr, president and CEO of EcoAgriculture Partners. “Land use and management is a critical part of the solution of the puzzle for mitigation and adaptation. It is finally, after many years, receiving serious policy attention, though it still only receives 3 to 4 percent of climate funding.”
What we need to scale NCS
Teresa Hartman, the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) lead for climate and nature, gave an overview of climate change and the increasing interest in NCS. Experts expect NCS and carbon finance to play a significant role in achieving private-sector and country-level net-zero carbon emissions targets. Wiser land use and nature are now recognized as important elements in any plan to mitigate and adapt to climate change.
She said that net-zero country targets now cover around 68 percent of the global economy, with 60 percent of emissions theoretically under a net-zero target. However, countries lag in developing policies to secure these commitments, making it difficult to get the finance necessary for implementation.
Hartman closed by discussing the WEF analysis of how to scale NCSs. The report’s authors found that NCS advocates need to make the private sector and countries more familiar with these solutions. The private sector is critical because of its financial reach and impacts across landscapes. With 2,360 businesses now committing to net zero, the private sector is more interested in long-term success due to these companies that have internalized their risks. However, there are still five elements needed to build trust in NCS to obtain the necessary funding and action from companies:
- Define net-zero and corporate claims (what net zero means for companies)
- Highlight good supply practices (co-benefits, measurable impact, investment quality)
- Send a demand signal (clear expectations for future market demand)
- Improve market architecture (financial and policy support systems)
- Create regulatory clarity (national and international policy alignment)
Many initiatives and commitments now support implementing and financing NCS across landscapes, including four connected to the WEF:
- Taskforce on Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets
- Lowering Emissions by Accelerating Forest Finance (LEAF) Coalition
- Voluntary Carbon Market Integrity Initiative
- Business Alliance for Scaling Climate Solutions
How do NCS fit within a landscape perspective?
Andrew Wu, Conservation International’s (CI) climate-positive approaches fellow, said something significant is missing in climate action.
“Landscape-level coordination and management are lacking to bridge the two more predominant strategies of top-down target setting and bottom-up project planning for climate projects and programs,” he said.
Bridging this gap is the focus of CI’s work in developing approaches that will support different stakeholders in making better decisions for climate, nature and people. Wu said lessons learned from NCS projects need to be scaled to be consistent with climate targets that are also aligned to landscape partnership and community priorities.
Wu shared CI’s developing approach to support countries, sectors and landscape partnerships to scale NCS within any landscape. The methodology called climate-positive approaches that he’s developing is “a spatially explicit roadmap of scaling needed for NCS to reach ambitious carbon targets,” he said. The approach’s objective is to bridge science and implementation while increasing project buy-in by estimating the financial, ecological and social benefits of NCS across landscapes.
For climate-positive approaches to succeed, it will be essential to work with local partners to prioritize what benefits and results are most needed, allowing for optimized synergies amongst different NCS in each parcel of land that can scale up to the entire landscape.
Lessons learned from implementing NCS
Sasha Koo-Ooshima, FAO’s deputy director of the Land and Water Division, focused her remarks on two core areas of work being led by her team on land degradation neutrality and water scarcity. She shared FAO’S focus on building a science-policy interface, finance tools, sequestration maps and a real-time monitoring tool for agricultural water conservation.
Koo-Ooshima spoke to agriculture’s impacts on deforestation and freshwater overuse and contamination. Agriculture uses 70 percent of freshwater globally.
“Natural climate solutions apply for maintaining soil moisture, as well as soil carbon, storing soil in wetlands and forests while protecting water quality downstream with other co-benefits, such as biodiversity and providing livelihood support to smallholder farmers,” she said
Shaun Martin, World Wildlife Fund (WWF)’s vice president of ecological and social resilience, said it is essential to use integrated approaches in landscapes to ensure local communities achieve non-climate co-benefits like boosting livelihoods and biodiversity. Nature-based solutions (NbS) are those that “are conservation actions designed to address societal challenges, climate change being only one of those,” he said.
Martin shared WWF case studies in Colombia, Fiji, Madagascar and Mexico. He offered an overview of his organization’s challenges, such as local governance, evolving climate risks in mangroves, and the essential services people need to support nature in a changing climate.
Both Koo-Ooshima and Martin shared various tools and evidence produced by FAO and WWF, highlighting what has and hasn’t worked and what enabling conditions are needed.
Finding a common language
Roundtable speakers offered definitions and differences between the similar ideas of NCS, NbS and integrated landscape management (ILM). Several agreed that there are issues with framing NCS, NbS and ILM because the terms hold different meanings for different people. For some of the panelists, the term NCS is meant only to entail carbon emission mitigation benefits. For others, NCS, NbS and ILM are all holistic approaches focused on sustainable development, including ecosystem services and livelihoods. While no one embraced a single definition, the panelists agreed that the best method of defining NCS or NbS for climate is through a solution’s ability to quantify the carbon mitigation benefit within a project, even when addressing climate change is not the primary objective.
However, no matter the definition, all the panelists agreed that increased financing and support are needed for these solutions. They each said they had experienced barriers, including a lack of resources and buy-in from investors to implement natural solutions at scale. A way to overcome these obstacles is by providing more data, tools and metrics to show investors why natural solutions are vital to solving global climate and sustainability issues.
This roundtable discussion highlighted a pressing need to use integrated approaches that increase the scale of natural solutions. However, time is an increasing concern. Climate change’s challenges and risks will affect landscapes everywhere, and there must be coordinated efforts and financing to mitigate and adapt to them.
Regardless of the approach’s name, stakeholders must connect the dots to discover ILM, NCS or NbS opportunities across agricultural, developmental financial and socio-cultural agendas. These solutions require improved models, mechanisms and partnerships. The roundtable showed that at least a strong base exists for new solutions to be built upon.