Doris Duke Charitable Foundation Partners With The Nature Conservancy To Explore Nature’s Ability To Mitigate Climate Change
The last two years have seen significant global advancement on climate action, with hundreds of global businesses and national and sub-national leaders building on the momentum of the Paris Agreement to initiate new climate pledges, initiatives and funding programs. But there remains a gap between promised action and realized climate progress, and many solutions available to us now remain underutilized—especially in the land sector, which currently accounts for nearly a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions.
In fact, new research shows that stewardship of the land can play a significant role in keeping global temperature increases under 2 degrees Celsius. The Nature Conservancy partnered with the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation to bring together more than two-dozen expert scientists specializing in conservation, climate modeling, and economists from a variety of global institutions to explore this issue. They found that nature’s ability to mitigate climate change is about 30 percent higher than previously projected.
These results are described in “Natural climate solutions,” published in Proceedings of the National Academies of the Sciences. The paper shows that with concerted global action between now and 2030, better land stewardship offers 37 percent of the solution for keeping global temperatures to 2 degrees Celsius or below—the same as if the world today put a complete stop on the burning of oil. In addition, the paper’s economic analyses show that natural climate solutions—the proven ways of storing and reducing carbon emissions in forests, grasslands and wetlands—can provide low-cost opportunities and are often significantly more cost effective when compared to technological solutions...