Humans have engineered climate change by manipulating the environment. There’s a hope that we may also be able to mitigate this, predominantly through reducing emissions, but in some cases by leveraging some of these same natural processes, a plan called Nature-based Climate Solutions (NbCS).
A majority of the climate-altering carbon dioxide humans release into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels gets drawn into Earth’s oceans and landscapes through natural processes such as photosynthesis, where plants turn atmospheric carbon dioxide into biomass.
Efforts to slow the climate crisis have long sought to harness nature, often through carbon “offsets,” aimed at bolstering forests, wetlands and agriculture, but have generally had only marginal success so far.
New research out of the University of Utah, UC Santa Barbara and eight other institutions analyzes various strategies for improving such nature-based climate solutions, specifically exploring the role of the world’s forests in pulling carbon out of the atmosphere and storing it in long-lived trees and even in the ground. The results, published in the journal Nature, were funded by the National Science Foundation.
“Forests have potential as nature-based climate solutions, aligned with broader sustainability benefits,” said co-author Anna Trugman, an associate professor in UCSB’s Department of Geography. “Unfortunately, a broad body of literature has revealed widespread problems in forest NbCS projects and protocols that undermine the climate mitigation of forest carbon credits and hamper efforts to reach global net zero.” She and her co-authors agree that improving NbCS will require better science and policy going forward.
