Nature can save humanity from the condemnation of climate, but not on its own

Here’s what not to do, Girardin says: Clear forests and plant new trees so corporations can offset carbon emissions. “We provide examples on paper where clean tree forests are cut down, so that planting forests can be planted to compensate for someone’s emissions from a flight,” he says. “It simply came to our notice then. Or communities relocated from the land they used to survive, once again planting forests to achieve carbon gains. That doesn’t make sense. “

Mono-cutting trees to compensate for someone’s plane miles won’t work, agrees Peter Ellis, global director of climate science at the Nature Conservancy, who didn’t take part in the new role. But returning the ecosystem to its natural state can better prepare us to survive the climate change we have cultivated. “More biodiversity ecosystems result in greater resilience to future climate impacts,” says Ellis. “And they offer important co-benefits that people care about, which will help them invest in maintaining these natural climate solutions.”

That’s key to buying food and clean water that depend on these ecosystems from residents – explaining the immediate and local benefits of reforestation, not the long-term benefits to the community around the world. “Unless we really talk about the benefits of water quality,” says environmental economist Daniela Miteva of the University of Ohio, “offering lots of trees and malaria or things that care for local people makes it very difficult to get the community to buy.

Miteva works on nature-based solutions in northern Uganda and Indonesia. (He was not involved in this new work.) Both countries are facing deforestation, but each local situation is unique, for example based on historical property rights. For example, a government can give money to households for not clearing a particular forest, known as the “payment for ecosystem service”.

“Unless we talk about other benefits along with carbon, it’s very difficult to accept that idea locally – that’s been my experience at least,” Miteva says. “There’s the idea of ​​white people going to the Global South and telling people what to do, the whole idea of ​​carbon colonialism.”

An added difficulty is that advocates are trying to deploy nature-based solutions on a growing human population. The more people on earth live, the more land we need to feed everyone. “There’s this tension between wanting to conserve natural biodiversity systems while maintaining people and feeding people, and it’s a challenge,” says biogeochemist Rich Conant, who studies nature-based solutions at Colorado State University but is not involved in this new work. “Fortunately, I think a lot of the land we use for agriculture is used quite inefficiently, so I think there’s a lot of potential to increase food production on the land.” This can lead to strategies to improve irrigation and different crops, using the same amount of land to increase yields.

But it’s important that people can’t fix ecosystems, sit back and let nature do all the work. The same goes for relying on new technologies like “catching air directly” absorb carbon from the air and close underground. This is the moral hazard of climate change: to pay attention to the ways in which we catch our greenhouse gases, when we would have to do everything in our power to cut them completely and quickly.

“People” don’t worry about people, nature will save us from “giving,” Ellis says. “That’s the thing that keeps me that way at night. First of all, us are nature, with which we must work in concert. But we have to pedal the metals and set all the cylinders on fire if we humans and fellow space travelers are to get out of this situation that we have put ourselves in. ”