Nature-based Solutions: a roadmap to businesses becoming climate positive

There is a plethora of carbon-related terms out there now: carbon neutral; carbon negative, climate positive; and carbon positive. We all know the first one. The second and third effectively mean the same thing: that an activity goes beyond achieving net zero carbon emissions to create an environmental benefit by removing additional carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The last term is yet another version of climate positive and carbon negative, though one that understandably tends to cause confusion.

Let’s stick with climate positive, a state which Mainer Associates is working towards achieving, with the help of the good people at Earthly.

Why is it important to become climate positive?

Obviously, it’s about tipping the scales. While becoming carbon neutral means an organisation can be confident that they’re not further damaging the planet, climate positive means that they’re doing their bit in the bigger fight to redress the balance back in favour of long-term sustainability. To do it properly requires some form of carbon accounting framework that can map the evidence.

Becoming climate positive means using Nature-based Solutions (NbS), which are solutions that work with nature to address social changes that can then provide benefits both in terms of human well-being and biodiversity. Here’s the first definition of what NbS are from 2016 created by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN):

“actions to protect, sustainably manage, and restore natural or modified ecosystems, that address societal challenges effectively and adaptively, simultaneously providing human well-being and biodiversity benefits”.

NbS have become such an important part of the sustainability toolbox that they’re now front and centre at international summits, such as the Climate Ambition Summit co-convened by the United Nations, the UK and France last December.

Broadly speaking, NbS involve the protection, restoration and management of natural ecosystems – for example, growing forests; managing aquatic systems; the creation of new ecosystems in and around urban areas. Communities can be protected, infrastructure strengthened, water supplies secured, and climate change mitigated.

Of course, such actions cannot be a substitute for phasing out fossil fuels and generally decarbonising the economy, as the guidelines make clear; rather, NbS must be used in parallel with that overarching aim. Here is the relevant section:

“NbS play a vitally important role in helping to mitigate climate change this century, but their contribution is relatively small compared to what must be achieved by the rapid phase-out of fossil fuel use. Furthermore, unless we drastically reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, global heating will adversely affect the carbon balance of many ecosystems, turning them from net sinks to net sources of GHGs.”

Resilience and Adaptation to Climate Change Infrastructure. Photo: Blaine o'Neill/licensed under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

This is the natural revolution

The above line is what greets a visitor to Earthly’s website. What do they mean by this revolution?

“200 years ago, the industrial revolution changed the way we live and work. And it started to change the climate. Now, two centuries later, the only way we can give ourselves a fighting chance is by working with nature to undo the damage caused by industry and create a climate-positive planet. We call this The Natural Revolution.”

To achieve this, the team works with an independent board of scientific advisors and natural solution partners to advise and set businesses up to achieve climate positive solutions. Here is what they have to say about the service they offer:

“Our science-backed natural solutions help you balance your carbon impact – and go beyond, to become climate-positive. And our immersive platform makes it easy for you to see and share your positive impact”.

There are three stages to a business’s journey:

1.       Finding out what is their current level of carbon impact and consequently working out reduction pathways

2.       Working out what is the right bundle of natural solutions, which are all science-backed and third-party verified

3.       Becoming climate positive, and seeing this through the organisation’s immersive platform

Nature-Based Credits and transparent counting

Clearly, climate positive solutions are a form of carbon offsetting, though Earthly is very much of the view that NbS as a method of carbon renewal is a better way to think about getting rid of carbon than offsetting, which can give a free pass to companies that are “living a high carbon lifestyle but paying to be guilt-free”, as an article on their site argues. Furthermore, NbS are much more than just a guilt-reducing offsetting mechanism. For that reason, they don’t use cheap carbon credits that don’t always represent the true costs involved; rather, Nature-Based Credits.

Traditional credits are less likely to be additional. To state the obvious, for any new initiative a company does to be effective, it must be additional to what it was already doing and must be counted discretely. There can be a problem with double counting, where a particular credit is counted more than once in the market. Nature-Based Credits don’t work like that. There’s no overestimation nor double counting.

In this context, new US President Biden is expected to raise the social cost of carbon (SCC) dollar value, at least to its value back in 2017, at the end of the Obama administration, with the expected figure to be $52 per ton, though a number of economists has suggested that figure is still too low. Biden has also recommenced the Interagency Working Group, who will report fully by next January with a final number, with the interim number to be made public within 30 days.

As should be clear, moving towards being climate positive is taking place in terms of both compliance, as mandated by government and indeed the voluntary market, which includes Mainer Associates, and which Earthly serves. The multiple strategies NbS should use are matched by the multiple actors who need to think long-term to aid with the struggle for sustainability. There isn’t a choice here: carbon reduction must happen, and it needs to happen with speed and at scale.