The push for carbon pricing of valued protected areas like tropical rainforests and wetlands, with particular thrust on Indigenous peoples and local communities-led forest and wetland ecosystem restoration and protection, is at the forefront of global negotiations on utilizing Access and Benefit Sharing potential towards enlarging the protected areas coverage across the blue planet.
By Salam Rajesh
The global level discussions on climate change has since taken twists and turns in many ways, with scientific institutions and international organizations spending much time and energy in finding possible solutions towards climate mitigation and adaptation strategies. The latest in the deliberations is the push for possible solutions based on Natural Climate Solutions.
Natural Climate Solutions (NCS), which includes such practices as forest restoration, agro forestry and regenerative agriculture, are estimated to have the potential to deliver approximately one-third of the global Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions avoidance and the reductions needed to achieve the global 2030 and 2050 reduction goals.
The international organization Edge in their report ‘Cultivating a Rich Ecosystem of Natural Climate Solutions’ (July 2021) stresses on how to build upon and accelerate progress in the use of natural climate solutions. Edge, established 2008, is a specialist sustainability advisory company focused on North America, South America, and the Asia-Pacific region.
Emphasizing on the general observation that just as biodiversity in nature in general, and biodiversity within healthy soil, forests, and fields, leads to better outcomes and a healthier, more thriving environment, Edge re-emphasizes that “a broad diversity of organizations can and should make greater use of the wide range of NCS as tools in their toolkit for reducing climate impacts throughout their value chain”.
The NCS is projected as having the potential to address climate change in 3 different ways, namely, (a) Reducing greenhouse gas emissions associated with land use changes, (b) Capturing and sequestering carbon from the atmosphere, and (c) Improving ecosystem resilience to the predicted volatility of climate change.
Taking to task the concept of carbon marketing as a viable option for committing to achieving NCS goals, Edge says that ‘any organization committed to attaining the global target of net-zero emissions by 2050 should advocate for and support development of clear and consistent carbon market regulations developed with multi-stakeholder input’.
The push for carbon pricing of valued protected areas like tropical rainforests and wetlands, with particular thrust on Indigenous peoples and local communities-led forest and wetland ecosystem restoration and protection, is at the forefront of global negotiations on utilizing Access and Benefit Sharing potential towards enlarging the protected areas coverage across the blue planet.
With the projected vision of re-greening planet Earth in line with the UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration (2021-2030), the focus is on the regeneration of degraded ecosystems across various landscapes – mountains, grasslands, tropical forests, mangroves, coral reefs, oceans, and many other nature reserves.
The objective, in its totality, seeks to find the pathway in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals combined with addressing livelihoods issues through revival and revitalization of nature reserves that provide sources of food, fodder and sustenance for millions of forest and wetland dependent communities.
On this note, the report stresses that ‘Organizations with direct interaction with potential NCS, such as farmers, growers, ranchers, forest product and fiber producers, should seek to increase their understanding and usage of relevant and cost-effective NCS’.
It further notes that to achieve success at the grassroots, ‘Companies further down the value chain, such as brands using plant or animal inputs in their final products, should engage with and support their suppliers in expanding the use of NCS. More indirectly, but no less critically connected players such as investors, policymakers, and NGOs, should increase advocacy for and investment in NCS expansion’.
Forest restoration has been recognized by numerous experts and academic researchers as the NCS with the largest maximum carbon impact reduction potential. Forest restoration is defined ‘as the restoration and protection of forest landscapes through the conversion of degraded former forest or sparsely vegetated remnant forest land (less than 25% tree cover) to forest land (greater than 25% tree cover by US standards; greater than 20% tree cover in Australia)’.
Reflecting upon the present scenario on forest degradation across the globe, the report states that ‘Once covering up to 12% of earth’s landmass, the tropical forests now occupy only 5% having been tremendously reduced in their size and function through clearing, fragmentation, logging, development, and general degradation. Because tropical forests hold more carbon in their above ground biomass and once covered so much area, the potential for emissions and impact reduction through restoring these regions is almost four times larger than that of temperate forests’.
Defining regenerative agriculture as a set of conservation management principles designed to bring agricultural ecosystems closer to their native state, the report states that regenerative agriculture ‘will naturally store more carbon than working cropland as it is conventionally managed today’.
The conservation management principles as defined in regenerative agriculture practice include ‘maintaining continuous vegetative crop cover, minimizing soil disturbance, maximizing crop diversity, increasing organic residues returned to the soil, and optimizing plant nutrient uptake and water use efficiency’.
These principles when adopted in field could lead to extensive recovery of fully or partially degraded lands both in the uplands and in the floodplains, generating a revival of ecosystems vital to the climate mitigation strategies.
The Nature-based Solutions (NbS) as emphasized by the United Nations agencies, such as UNEP and UNDP, lays stress on turning to utilization of resources available from nature as the means to regenerating wastelands to healthy ecosystems.
Stressing on regenerative agriculture as sustainable practice, the report hints at the suggestion that ‘ecosystems under the regenerative practices begin to more closely resemble native grassland, soil carbon stocks increase as the rate of carbon loss is reduced and more carbon is returned to the soil via plants, mycorrhizae, and microorganisms’.
The report further details that ‘In practice, this is achieved through implementing reduced and no till, planting cover crops, diversifying crop rotations, establishing grassed waterways and buffer strips, using agro forestry techniques, grazing management, and grassland restoration’.
The focus and the outlook of this suggested pathway is in finding ready solutions in inducting an integrated management plan that looks holistically at resolving issues and recovery of wasted agricultural lands that can produce diversified crop yields while addressing top soil loss and nutrient deficiency which could otherwise hamper in successful regeneration of ecosystems.
(The writer is a media professional working on environmental issues. He can be reached at [email protected])