OUR WORK

Why nature-based solutions?

Reducing man-made greenhouse gasses is critical. Protecting and restoring nature is even more urgent.

The fastest, cheapest, and easiest way to fight climate change at mega-scales is to keep existing ecosystems healthy and intact. If we focus our energy on improving planetary health — including getting rid of toxic petrochemicals — we can make a big difference fast.

Let’s start with carbon.

Only 40 to 45% of man-made CO₂ ends up in the atmosphere. Nearly 60% gets absorbed by terrestrial and marine ecosystems — mostly forests, soils, and wetlands (including peatlands, coastal wetlands, and permafrost).

Terrestrial ecosystems store trillions of tons of carbon.

If we don’t act urgently, these threatened ecosystems could release 20 to 30 times more CO₂ than burning fossil fuels does in a year.

Planting trees does little to stop climate change. It’s the bigger, older trees we need to protect. One percent of trees contain 50 percent of forest carbon. If a forest is growing, no matter how old, it’s absorbing and storing CO₂, and lots of it!

Cutting down healthy forests sets off a downward spiral. Roughly 70% of the carbon dioxide released goes into the atmosphere for up to 1,000 years. At the same time, we lose the ongoing CO₂ removals those forests would have provided. More often than not, the land gets converted into greenhouse gas-intensive uses such as human development, agriculture, logging, or fossil fuel production.

Healthy ecosystems provide myriad other benefits: global cooling, clean air and water, food, jobs, and biodiversity. They protect us against floods, soil erosion, droughts, extreme weather, and zoonotic diseases like Ebola, HIV, and COVID-19.

The great news is that breakthroughs in technology and knowhow across multiple fields make it possible to scale up nature-based climate solutions at rapid speeds. 

We can target interventions with near-surgical precision, then model, measure, and track their impacts over time. We already know what to do, where to do it, and how to do it, using a technology proven to work for hundreds of millions of years — photosynthesis.

Even modest changes in the status quo can make an enormous difference over 30- to 50-year timeframes.