What are ‘nature-based solutions’ and what are they being proposed for?
‘Nature-based solutions’ (NbS) is a widely used but vaguely defined term. It means a range of things to different people, including many positive actions and approaches. But a group of actors are using the term to drive a particular agenda related to biodiversity and climate change. As a result, the societal challenge to which NbS are most commonly applied at present is the mitigation of climate change.
How does NbS claim to mitigate climate change?
In this context, emissions of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming, such as carbon dioxide, are sought to be ‘offset’ by safeguarding forest, soil and other ecosystems that can remove and store atmospheric carbon. While this approach has attracted corporate interest and spawned a huge market for carbon offset credits, the mitigation potential of nature is actually limited. In particular, the hype over NbS relies on the myth that the carbon-sequestering possibilities of nature can compensate for the continued burning of fossil fuels.
What are the concerns?
Offsets do not reduce the overall concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; at best, they result in no net emissions and are therefore central to achieving so-called ‘net zero’ emissions. Carbon markets and offset myths are however useful for the actors who want to continue with business as usual. This provides ample ‘greenwashing’ opportunities for fossil fuel actors and obscures the urgent need to stop fossil fuel emissions, with the failure to do so causing more biodiversity harm.
In addition, NbS as currently used conflates natural ecosystems such as forests, soils, grasslands, estuaries and mangroves with, for example, monoculture tree plantations, which would clearly not provide the same benefits, whether in terms of mitigation, adaptation or other ecosystem functions. There is a danger that these false solutions to the climate crisis will substitute for real action to protect biodiversity.
Despite their shortcomings, carbon markets and the NbS model have also been held out as a means of financing conservation of biological diversity. Appropriating forests and lands to serve such NbS strategies, however, threatens to dispossess the indigenous peoples and local communities who are the true stewards of the planet’s biodiversity. The irony of fossil fuel actors using the ecosystems that are inhabited, protected and managed by indigenous peoples and local communities, to offset their emissions, is a form of ‘carbon colonialism’.
[Moreover, the less that fossil fuel emissions are reduced, the greater the need for sinks. This will disproportionately shift the burden for climate mitigation to biodiverse-rich countries, which are largely in the South, while the North is able to continue its high-emissions trajectories. This will perpetuate further inequities.]
What needs to be done to address the climate and biodiversity crises?
To effectively counter climate change, there is no avoiding the need to reduce emissions to as close to zero as possible, in an equitable way. Tackling climate change requires both ending the burning of fossil fuels and doing all we can to take carbon that has accumulated from the previous century of fossil emissions out of the atmosphere.
At the same time, efforts to protect biodiversity – and the critical ecosystem functions it provides, including climate regulation (both mitigation and adaptation) – have to be rooted in protecting the rights of the indigenous peoples and local communities that inhabit, protect and manage those ecosystems.