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.
A new approach: contributions vs. credits
New research led by the University of Utah’s Wilkes Center for Climate Science & Policy offers a “roadmap” for accelerating climate solutions. To be published Thursday in the journal Nature, the paper analyses various strategies for improving such nature-based climate solutions, or NbCS, 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.
“Nature-based climate solutions are human actions that leverage natural processes to either take carbon out of the atmosphere or stop the emissions of carbon to the atmosphere,” said lead author and forest ecologist William Anderegg, a professor of biology and past Wilkes Center director. “Those are the two main broad categories. There are the avoided emissions, and that’s activities like stopping deforestation. Then there’s the greenhouse gas-removal pathways. That’s things like reforestation where you plant trees, and as those trees grow, they suck up CO2 out of the atmosphere.”
The U-led study, which includes leading scientists from nine other universities as part of a Wilkes Center Working Group effort, identifies four components where nature-based climate actions have not lived up to their billing and proposes reforms to improve their performance and scalability.
Forests are the focus because of trees’ ability to store vast amounts of carbon that would otherwise be in the atmosphere exacerbating the climate crises. Conversely, deforestation, especially in the Amazon rainforest, is releasing carbon at an alarming rate.
About half the emissions associated with human activity are absorbed into plants, through photosynthesis, and oceans, with the rest building up in the atmosphere where these gases trap heat. Terrestrial ecosystems pull 31% of anthropogenic emissions out of the atmosphere, according to the study. While forests are seen as Earth’s most vital carbon sponge, current rates of deforestation release 1.9 gigatons of carbon a year, on par with Russia’s annual emissions. Thus, “actions to halt and reverse deforestation are a critical part of climate stabilization pathways,” the authors write.