Getting the Message Right on Nature-Based Solutions to Climate Change

Nature‐based solutions can play a key role in helping to tackle the climate and nature crises, while delivering other benefits for people, according to a new paper today from the Nature-based Solutions Initiative (NbSI) at the University of Oxford - but it is vital to get the message right about how to deliver successful NbS and avoid potential pitfalls.

Professor Nathalie Seddon, Director of the NbSI and joint first author of the paper, explains NbS projects are people-led and biodiversity-based. They emerged in the late 2000s as a move away from conserving nature for its own sake to conserving nature for people’s sake and they currently have huge traction in business and government. They were high on the agenda at Davos last week and are a major theme of November's climate change conference, COP26, being hosted by the UK government.

But, as Alison Smith from Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute and joint first author of the paper, explains, ‘Most of the recent limelight has been on tree planting for carbon sequestration - and often these trees are commercial plantations of non-native species with little benefit for biodiversity.’

She notes, ‘The expansion of forestry framed as a climate change mitigation solution is being used for corporate greenwashing, as an excuse for continued use of fossil fuels. Although it is vital to protect a diverse mix of carbon-rich and bio-diverse native ecosystems, such as old-growth forests, natural grasslands and wetlands, there is a limit to the carbon that can be stored by newly planted trees - and this carbon is at risk if trees are harvested or if they die from fire, drought or disease as the climate continues to warm.

Read more at University of Oxford

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