Natural climate solutions

By B. Griscom, Justin Adams, Peter W. Ellis, Richard A. Houghton, Guy Lomax, D. Miteva, W. Schlesinger, D. Shoch, Juha Siikamäki, Pete Smith and 22 more. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2017

2,725 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Significance Most nations recently agreed to hold global average temperature rise to well below 2 °C. We examine how much climate mitigation nature can contribute to this goal with a comprehensive analysis of “natural climate solutions” (NCS): 20 conservation, restoration, and/or improved land management actions that increase carbon storage and/or avoid greenhouse gas emissions across global forests, wetlands, grasslands, and agricultural lands. We show that NCS can provide over one-third of the cost-effective climate mitigation needed between now and 2030 to stabilize warming to below 2 °C. Alongside aggressive fossil fuel emissions reductions, NCS offer a powerful set of options for nations to deliver on the Paris Climate Agreement while improving soil productivity, cleaning our air and water, and maintaining biodiversity. Better stewardship of land is needed to achieve the Paris Climate Agreement goal of holding warming to below 2 °C; however, confusion persists about the specific set of land stewardship options available and their mitigation potential. To address this, we identify and quantify “natural climate solutions” (NCS): 20 conservation, restoration, and improved land management actions that increase carbon storage and/or avoid greenhouse gas emissions across global forests, wetlands, grasslands, and agricultural lands. We find that the maximum potential of NCS—when constrained by food security, fiber security, and biodiversity conservation—is 23.8 petagrams of CO2 equivalent (PgCO2e) y−1 (95% CI 20.3–37.4). This is ≥30% higher than prior estimates, which did not include the full range of options and safeguards considered here. About half of this maximum (11.3 PgCO2e y−1) represents cost-effective climate mitigation, assuming the social cost of CO2 pollution is ≥100 USD MgCO2e−1 by 2030. Natural climate solutions can provide 37% of cost-effective CO2 mitigation needed through 2030 for a >66% chance of holding warming to below 2 °C. One-third of this cost-effective NCS mitigation can be delivered at or below 10 USD MgCO2−1. Most NCS actions—if effectively implemented—also offer water filtration, flood buffering, soil health, biodiversity habitat, and enhanced climate resilience. Work remains to better constrain uncertainty of NCS mitigation estimates. Nevertheless, existing knowledge reported here provides a robust basis for immediate global action to improve ecosystem stewardship as a major solution to climate change.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cd504aedb3438e9441d372afb53d28c3b5855cea

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In Global and Planetary Change

Citations in the corpus

Carbon‐Neutral Pathways for the United States (2021, background): “In addition to siting and biomass, increasing the land carbon sink is another element of the competing priorities among climate mitigation, food production, and other land uses (Griscom et al., 2017).”
Understanding the value and limits of nature-based solutions to climate change and other global challenges (2020, background): “Decreasing sources and increasing sinks of GHGs through terrestrial ecosystem stewardship and improvements in agriculture are widely cited as having the potential to provide around 30% of the CO2 mitigation needed through to 2030 to keep warming to less than 2°C [12,49,50].”
How feasible are global forest restoration commitments? (2020, background): “…center of the global discussion on ways to combat climate change, prevent species extinctions, and improve rural livelihoods (Bastin et al., 2019; Griscom et al., 2017; IUCN, 2018; Suding et al., 2015; This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License,…”