THIRD WORLD NETWORK INFORMATION SERVICE ON SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE

Dear friends and colleagues,

“Nature-based Solutions” and the Biodiversity and Climate Crises

We are pleased to share with you a new paper, ‘“Nature-based Solutions” and the Biodiversity and Climate Crises’ by Dr Doreen Stabinsky.

“Nature-based solutions” (NbS) have been defined as “actions to protect, sustainably manage and restore natural or modified ecosystems that address societal challenges…”. The societal challenge to which NbS are most commonly applied at present is the mitigation of 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 which 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 limited. To effectively counter climate change, there is thus no avoiding the need to reduce emissions to as close to zero as possible.

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.

In light of the dangers and drawbacks of turning to “nature-based solutions”, this paper poses the question: Whose nature is being asked to solve which problems?

Please find below the Introduction from the paper (Item 1) and its table of contents (Item 2).

The full paper is available here.

With best wishes,

Third World Network

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Item 1

Introduction

“Nature-based solutions” (NbS) is a contested term. Academics write long peer-reviewed articles laying out criteria by which so-called NbS might be evaluated, whilst oil majors create new “nature-based solutions” business units unaligned with the basic elements of the definitional criteria being set out by the academics. At the end of the day, NbS means what the powerful actors using it to green their images want it to mean.

The phrase “nature-based solutions” says everything and nothing at the same time. Its proponents argue that such a broadly encompassing term provides opportunities to highlight a whole range of beneficial, biodiversity-protecting practices at the same time, and that packaging all these together in this term might help mobilize protection from a range of drivers of biodiversity and ecosystem loss by calling attention to the myriad ways in which societies benefit from “nature”.

But the opportunities provided by the catchall term must be weighed against the risks and dangers of catching too much, providing a convenient cloak for practices that destroy biodiversity. One of the most dramatic examples might be the oil company proclaiming to be saving nature while using the green image to hide continued exploration, extraction, and burning of fossil fuels, an example that is at the same time illustrative and illuminating of how actors make a term mean what they need it to mean. While academics and advocates have devoted large amounts of human and financial resources to developing standards, guidelines and frameworks putting boundaries around NbS, none of those are adequate to protect nature from the fossil fuel and other extractive industries seeking convenient public relations cover for their devastating operations. Indeed, the term “nature-based solutions”, for the biodiversity-destroying industries, is an enormous public relations gift. The fossil majors liberally wrapping themselves in NbS demonstrates its PR value.

While greenwashing may be the first and most visible of the dangers posed by the term, the full range of threats is broader and deeper. “Nature-based solutions” may be used to justify dispossession through land grabbing and “fortress conservation”. Land-based carbon offsets, biodiversity offsets, and “fortress conservation”-style “protected areas” are all NbS strategies of corporations and other powerful actors that will require land and ecosystems not yet under their control. Those strategies threaten to displace or otherwise dispossess the current owners and stewards of targeted lands – in particular indigenous peoples and local communities.

Equity becomes a central concern in this contested space. Powerful actors demand and secure access to lands and forests, prioritizing the needs of wealthy countries, corporations, and other global elites to offset their consumption and destruction over the needs and rights to land, life, and livelihoods of indigenous peoples, local communities, species, and ecosystems.

One of the main means by which nature is turned into NbS is through the narratives, techniques, and technologies of economic valuation. In this time of climate crisis, ecosystems are reduced in value to the carbon they contain. Once reduced to their constituent carbon, the carbon-rich elements of ecosystems – most often trees and soils – can be traded on markets. The carbon in land and forests may be further reinvented and repackaged as an “asset class” for new means of capital accumulation through speculation and financialization.

Carbon gains in value as its scarcity rises. Scarcity is currently being manufactured through thousands of “net zero” pledges and the misunderstandings, unintentional or deliberate, of what “net zero” actually means and what sorts of actions it requires. The erroneous interpretation holds that emissions might continue as long as there are offsets available to be purchased in carbon-rich lands and forests. However, the actions “net zero” actually requires preclude offsetting – fossil fuel emissions must be reduced to as close to zero as possible and ecosystems restored and protected.

If misinterpretations are ignored and emissions-as-usual continue, there will be little contribution that nature can make in the end to addressing climate change. As temperatures rise, ecosystems will begin to collapse, liberating carbon and further contributing to catastrophic positive feedback cycles. Climate change is, of course, one of the primary drivers of biodiversity loss. The threat of runaway climate change is creating a landing ground for arguments to expand geoengineering research and experimentation, which pose other unique dangers for biodiversity, indigenous peoples, and local communities.

The storyline from NbS to geoengineering has its twists and turns, through “net zero” pledges and the financialization of nature. And it has common threads holding it together, philosophies and ideologies that underpin its neoliberal and neocolonial approaches to nature and its defenders.

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Item 2

CONTENTS

1.      INTRODUCTION

2. THE MANY DEFINITIONS OF “NATURE-BASED SOLUTIONS”

A. The genesis and evolution of the term

B. Many NbS definitions foreground climate change mitigation

C. Defining “nature” as “solution”: Whose nature? Whose solution?

3. “NET ZERO” AND NATURE

A. How “net zero” creates a need for “nature”

B. Dangerous myths and scientific realities of carbon removal

C. The scale of what nature can provide in removals

D. There is no way to zero without decarbonization

4. “NET ZERO”, CARBON OFFSET MARKETS, AND “NATURE-BASED” DECEPTIONS

5. CONNECTING THE CLIMATE AND BIODIVERSITY  DOTS: IMPLICATIONS FOR BIODIVERSITY GOVERNANCE

A. Biodiversity, climate change, and geoengineering

B. Financing conservation

6. CONCLUDING THOUGHTS ON THE NATURE AND CLIMATE CRISES