By Alchemist-hp (talk) (www.pse-mendelejew.de) [FAL], from Wikimedia Commons
This article was originally published on Phys.org
“On Sept. 12, Nature4Climate.org launched the “Forgotten Solution Campaign” at the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco. The hashtag #TheForgottenSolution rapidly populated the twittersphere. Eleven partner organizations and 18 foundations celebrated their support of the Nature4Climate initiative. Their message reached global coverage by news organizations, such as the BBC. This movement, also known as the “30×30 Forests, Food, and Land Challenge” emphasizes the substantial contribution natural ecosystems can provide to mitigating climate change.
The message is clear: Protecting and restoring forests, producing food more sustainably, and improving land use can deliver 30 percent of the climate solution needed by 2030. Natural climate solutions are less than 1 percent of the conversation and they receive less than 3 percent of climate funding. This is a powerful message. But it is not enough to emphasize that we need nature to fight climate change, because nature also needs our help to fulfill this important task. Realizing natural climate solutions requires effective human interventions of natural systems.
Environmentalists Jane Goodall and Harrison Ford and politicians Gov. Jerry Brown and John Podesta – among many other champions – raised their voices to do what scientists have failed to do: bring awareness about natural climate solutions into the public arena. Their voices echo what scientists have been saying for years: carbon storage in forest, wetland, grassland, and agricultural ecosystems is an essential component of global climate mitigation.
A recent peer-reviewed scientific publication showed that natural climate solutions can provide more than one-third of the cost-effective climate mitigation needed between now and 2030 to stabilize global warming to below 2°C. Basically, if we allow nature to simply do its thing, the resulting natural processes could store 11 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide a year, roughly equivalent to the emissions prevented by stopping the burning of oil worldwide…”
Read on at: Phys.org
