Daniel Balakov, iStock
This post is authored by Brian Buma, Senior Climate Scienist, Environmental Defense Fund.
Nature is vital to our success in fighting climate change and its real-world impacts. To unlock nature’s climate potential, we need investments to go to impactful nature-based climate solutions (NbCS), which refer to strategies to conserve, restore or improve the management of natural and working ecosystems for their climate benefits.
However, in a research paper recently published by myself and others, we found markets for NbCS were getting ahead of the science. In particular, we found many NbCS where carbon crediting was proposed or implemented had questionable scientific foundations.
We need NbCS to work, and we’re spending tens of millions in the hopes they do. Yet as our study shows, questions remain on how we can achieve the best ground-level outcomes and maximize the enormous potential of these solutions to lower greenhouse gas concentrations.
To illustrate how NbCS can work successfully, we need to look at science and implementation and understand how these two key components are different, but also interconnected.
Let’s start by thinking about your car.