Nature-based solutions are not enough to solve the climate crisis

But they are so much more. Let's dive in!

Nature-based solutions are a key tool in the arsenal to mitigate climate change and stem biodiversity loss. Photo by Luca Bravo on Unsplash

What is the best way for society to reach a sustainable future? How can we make ecosystems more resilient to future climate shocks? How can we restore the function that has been lost from ecosystems over the past centuries? Can climate solutions also be biodiversity solutions?

These are questions I find myself thinking about regularly. There is certainly no single answer to this but one thing is for sure and that is that we need to focus on natural solutions.

For too long, we have ripped apart nature. We have removed a third of our global forests at the expense of monocultures for food, most of this over the past century. We have almost literally¹ gutted natural ecosystems around the world.

It’s no secret that this is a major problem. Natural ecosystems provide fundamental goods and services like clean water for drinking, food, medicine, and many other benefits. Ecosystems are worth somewhere in the order of $125 trillion per year if you try to place a monetary value on them. In the United States alone, the economic value of insect pollination was estimated to be $34 billion in 2012​. Indeed, one out of every three bites of food is created with the help of pollinators.

Pollinators were estimated to be worth $34 billion for the US alone in 2012. Photo by Shakib Uzzaman on Unsplash

So it’s pretty obvious that we need to prioritise the protection of existing natural ecosystems and biodiversity. And we need to focus on restoring ecosystems. This can be done in a way that benefits many other societal challenges like disaster risk reduction, food provision and water security. Such approaches are called nature-based solutions (full definition below).

It’s ironic really, isn’t it? That the best way to undo the damage humans have done to the environment is to replace what’s been taken away. Pretty simple stuff.

Nature-based solutions have had a bit of a bad rap at times. This is partly because they’ve become bit of a trendy topic that didn’t always come with clear scientific goalposts or guidelines. And so I’ve tended to think of nature-based solutions as a bit gimmicky at times. But this is the wrong way to look at things, not least because global standards have increased in recent years. Indeed, nature-based solutions are a fundamental tool in our toolbox for stemming biodiversity loss and mitigating the effects of climate change among many other societal challenges that I outline below.

Yet, we still tend to focus on “command-and-control” approaches to managing the environment. Rivers are a primary case in point. Hard engineering dominates flood risk infrastructure. Yet, all this does is translate risk elsewhere. For instance, building higher and higher stop-banks or levees in response to increased risks from extreme floods helps to avoid localised impacts of flooding, but these risks are then transferred downstream. So we lock the system into a modified state that needs continual management. (Note: I realise there are cases where hard engineering is unavoidable, such as in urban environments where risk to human life and infrastructure is high.)

In the rest of this post, I want to simply introduce the idea of nature-based solutions and what they may look like to provide context for future posts that dive deeper into specific examples.

What are nature-based solutions?

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) define nature-based solutions as:

… actions to protect, sustainably manage, and restore natural and modified ecosystems, that address societal challenges effectively and adaptively, simultaneously providing human well-being and biodiversity benefits.

According to the IUCN, nature-based solutions address seven key societal challenges:

1. Climate change mitigation and adaptation

2. Disaster risk reduction

3. Economic and social development

4. Human health

5. Food security

6. Water security

7. Reversing environmental degradation and biodiversity loss

As you can see, only one of these is climate change mitigation and adaptation. So nature-based solutions are much more than a climate change tool. They include things like the protection, restoration or management of natural and semi-natural ecosystems; green infrastructure in urban environments; sustainable agricultural practices; and natural approaches to river management.

For instance, that might include designing habitat networks that help species inhabit and move through cities that are robust to future climate change. Such networks can also provide urban cooling benefits, habitat for pollinators, promote carbon sequestration, and increase people’s access to green spaces (which provides numerous human health benefits). These are diverse socio-ecological benefits that can be met when designed properly.

The cost-effectiveness of nature-based solutions are a key reason they need to be rolled out more widely. Even better is the fact they provide multiple co-benefits, such as enhancing biodiversity, supporting local economies, and improving human health and well-being. This differs from the typical command-and-control approach that humans have taken towards managing the environment.

In brief, they offer a more holistic approach to managing the environment by working with nature rather than against it.

How do nature-based solutions differ from natural climate solutions?

Natural climate solutions are deliberate human actions that protect, restore, and improve the management of forests, wetlands, grasslands, oceans, and agricultural lands to mitigate climate change (reduce greenhouse gas emissions and store carbon) (Griscom et al. 2017).

So natural climate solutions overlap with nature-based solutions, but are more narrowly targeted. Although they focus on climate specifically, they can come with widespread co-benefits to local communities, human health, biodiversity and so on. For instance, trees and forests are natural climate solutions when targeting carbon sequestration, but well-designed forests can simultaneously target a broader set of actions focused on societal challenges (nature-based solutions).

The best way to put it that I’ve heard recently is that “if it’s undermining biodiversity then it’s not a nature-based solution”².

The overlap between nature-based solutions (NbS) and natural climate solutions (NCS). NCS focus on a single outcome (CO₂ equivalents; CO₂e), whereas NbS are more diverse in their benefits. Note that NbS can address 7 key societal challenges according to the IUCN, outlined above. Image source: Ellis et al. (2024) Nature Communications.

Where to next?

One thing is for sure, nature-based solutions are not the answer to all of our climate problems. But they can be a useful tool among others. And their focus is much more diverse than just climate mitigation.

Nature-based solutions aren’t without their problems. Regularly surfaced problems include co-opting and greenwashing. They’re a convenient sell, particularly when used for carbon offsets. Carbon offsetting raises serious integrity issues for nature-based solutions. A recent paper in Science found that most carbon offset projects they examined did not significantly reduce deforestation, and of those that did, the benefits were oversold.

Despite having the potential to deliver diverse benefits to people and nature, nature-based solutions have often been thought of narrowly as planting trees for carbon sequestration. In reality, nature-based solutions are much more diverse than this.

To complicate this is the fact that they, just like carbon credit systems, can distract from the need to reduce emissions, and focus on conservation and managing species invasions among other key drivers of biodiversity loss. Offsets should be the last resort.

To move forward, it’s clear that major shifts in the collective mindset are required. In his recent presentation at the Nature-Based Solutions Conference in Oxford, Unai Pascual emphasised that:

transformative nature-based solutions requires collective action and responsibility

• for social and institutional structures

• for improving social-ecological wellbeing

• and for peoples connection with nature

Yet, nature-based solutions are a harder sell for policymakers and members of the public because of their perceived risk compared to contemporary approaches. For instance, going back to the river example, widening a river’s boundaries has the perception of greater risk and uncertainty compared to hard infrastructure. However, these grey solutions, such as increasing stop-bank (levee) size and reinforcing bank protection, in many cases provide a false sense of security. Flood magnitudes are extremely uncertain over the next century given the rate at which climate change is unfolding and the uncertainties with modelling. At the same time, hard infrastructure provides singular benefits: flood risk mitigation. By contrast, nature-based solutions provide many co-benefits from ecological to social to financial.

Moving forward, Seddon et al. (2021) raise four guiding principles for nature-based solutions (NbS), which I support:

1. NbS are not a substitute for the rapid phase out of fossil fuels

2. NbS involve a wide range of ecosystems on land and in the sea, not just forests

3. NbS are implemented with the full engagement and consent of Indigenous Peoples and local communities in a way that respects their cultural and ecological rights

4. NbS should be explicitly designed to provide measurable benefits for biodiversity.

These points reflect my thinking. As I’ve pointed out previously, solutions need to be transdisciplinary, engaging social scientists, economists, ecologists, Indigenous Peoples, local stakeholders and so on.

So, no, nature-based solutions are not enough to solve the climate crisis, but they are a fundamentally important piece of the puzzle. We need to throw everything we have at this existential crisis. But, more importantly nature-based solutions provide much more than climate fixes. Instead, they focus on tackling widespread societal challenges from disaster risk reduction to food security and human health.

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1. I say almost literally as I hate misusing the term ‘literally’. But here it really is equivalent to gutting an ecosystem as natural ecosystems have such a tangled web of life that the innards are removed when forests are felled. Natural forest ecosystems have their own microbiome, including hyperdiverse combinations of fungi, bacteria, oomycetes, etc.

2. I wish I could remember who I heard this from for proper attribution but I can’t.